1
20
1
-
https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/sjcdigitalarchives/original/c90e86698867d0d27ae95eae9b7ed48f.pdf
64f751389a2f8afbdb6799d17700eb89
PDF Text
Text
THE
St. o
'sReview
I
:
... ::: ............... ~--'~---1. ....... .
. . .
I
··.. . .
·.. :•. .
'
I
.•
.
..
)·<··
. · _:.-··
-
Winter, 1985
'·
�Editor:
J. Walter Sterling
Poetry Editor:
Richard Freis
Editorial Assistant:
Jason Walsh
Editorial Board:
Eva Brann
S. Richard Freis,
Alumni representative
Joe Sachs
Cary Stickney
Curtis A. Wilson
To the editor:
At the urging of alumni and colleagues, and with the co-operation of
Mrs. Klein, I am undertaking to
gather material for a brieflife of jacob
Klein. I shall be pleased to have
documents, reminiscences, or other
memorabilia.
I would be particularly pleased to
hear from alumni who were members
of his classes in his first years of
teaching, especially his first seminar.
Wye J. Allanbrook
St. John's College
Unsolicited articles, storieS, and poems
are welcome, but should be accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed
envelope in each instance. Reasoned
comments are also welcome.
The St. John's Review (formerly The College) is published by the Office of the
Dean, St. John's College, Annapolis,
Maryland 21404. Edwin J. Delattre,
President, George Do'skow, Dean.
Published thrice yearly, in the winter,
spring, and summer. For those not on
the distribution list, subscriptions:
$12.00 yearly, $24.00 for two years, or
$36.00 for three years, payable in advance. Address all correspondence to
The St. John's Review, St.John's College,
Annapolis, Maryland 21404.
Volume XXXVI, Number 1
Winter, 1985
©
1985 St. John's College; All rights
reserved. Reproduction in whole or in
part without permission is prohibited.
ISSN 0277-4720
Composit£on: Fishergate Publishing Co. 1 Inc.
Printing: St. John's College Press
Cover: A Black-Figured Amphora
from the Boston Museum (Drawn,
measured and analyzed by L.D.
Caskey).
�THE
StJohn's Review
Contents
2 ...... The Parable of Don Quixote
Joe Sachs
10 ...... Politics and the Imagination
Eva Brann
19 ...... Five From The Old Testament (poem)
J
Kates
22 ...... James Joyce's Soul
Joseph Engelberg
27 ...... Watching Plains Daybreak (poem)
Richard Freis
28 ...... Self-Portraits
Elliott Zuckerman
36 ...... The Opera Singer as Interpreter:
A Conversation with Sherrill Milnes
Susan Fain
40 ...... Dynamic Symmetry, A Theory of Art and Nature
Howard J Fisher
56 . . . . . . The Song of Timaeus
Peter Kalkavage
68 . . . . . . A Note on Eva Brann's "Roots of Modernity"
Chaninah Maschler
BooK REviEw
77 . . . . . . Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze de Figaro and Don Giovanni
John Plato.ff
79 . . . . . . The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews by Flannery
O'Connor
Victor Gallerano
�THE ST. JoHN's REviEw
Winter 1985
The Parable of Don Quixote
Joe Sachs
n the twenty-fifth chapter of the first part of Don
Quixote, the fortunes and spirits of the book's hero
are at their lowest. He has been bruised and
laughed at, and has lost part of an ear and most
of his teeth. He has mistaken an inn for a castle,
whores for maidens, and windmills and sheep_ for
enemies. His intervention in the affairs of others has led
a servant boy to be beaten worse than before, and has
set loose on Spain an entire column of convicts who have
made him and Sancho the first of their new victims. Even
the simple-hearted Sancho has lost his trust in his master.
" 'God alive, Sir Knight of the Mournful Countenance;
said Sancho, 'I cannot bear in patience some of the things
that your Grace says! Listening to you, I come to think
that all you have told me about deeds of chivalry ...
is but wind and lies, all buggery or humbuggery, or
whatever you choose to call it. When anyone hears your
Grace ... , what is he to think except that such a one
is out of his mind?' " Shortly Don Quixote will be left
alone, sunk in gloom, in the Sierra Moreno, the Dark
Mountains. He had entered that lonely place partly out
of fear of the police, a fear which could influence him
because of his disappointment over the behavior of those
he thought he was helping. But even at such a time, Don
Quixote has an answer for his squire.
" 'Look, Sancho; said Pon Quixote, 1Jy that same God
I swear that you have less sense than any squire in the
world ever had. How is it possible for you to have accompanied me all this time without coming to perceive
I
Joe Sachs is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His lecture The JtUry
of Aeneas appeared in the Winter '82 issue of the Review. The Parable of Don
Quixote was origin<>.lly delivered as a formal lecture at St. John's College, Annapolis in September, 1982.
2
that all the things that have to do with knights-errant
appear to be mad, foolish, and chimerical, and everything
happens backwards?' "It is Don Quixote's standard evasion when things go wrong or he is proved wrong: we
are enchanted. Our senses are not to be trusted, and
things are not as they seem. In this case he is ·driven to
claim that everything is exactly the opposite of the way
it seems, and he is right.
The remainder of Part one, after Don Quixote enters
the Sierra Moreno, is the long unfolding of a series of
happy endings of stories yet to be made known to us,
and which come to pass without any effort on Don
Quixote's part. His last action in Part one is the freeing
of the convicts in Chapter twenty-two, with thirty chapters
remaining. Yet none of the good that is done in those
thirty chapters could have happened were it not for the
earlier deeds of Don Quixote. And the happy endings
do not come about by some comic reversal of Don Quixote's intentions. They grow out of his deeds directly in
the spirit of those deeds, by a Quixotic contagion. Finally,
it is not the case that Don Quixote's actions are justified
only by unforeseen cons~quences, but each of his acts
is, for those who have eyes to see it, good in itself, and
exactly the opposite of the way it seems.
Pairs of contrasting opposites in Don Quixote are often
remarked. The book combines the conventions of romantic fiction with all the ugly, smelly facts of real life. Of
the two main characters, one is tall, thin, energetic, and
spiritual, the other short, fat, lazy, and corporeal. The
main character acts like a lunatic but speaks like the wisest
of men. But the most important contrast in the book is
less often noticed. It is that between the story the narrator understands himself to be telling and the one he
tells, and it points the way to the underlying distinction
on which the book is built: the distinction between fact
and truth.
WINTER 1985
�Cervantes puts between himself and his story a
historian who comes from a nation known for lying
(I.9,II.3), a translator, and perhaps one or more other
people; it is the sort of matter about which Cervantes
is not a very careful bookkeeper. But there is one consistent voice which presents to us all the episodes in the
book, including those which precede the beginning of
Cid Hamete Benengeli's manuscript and those for which,
as Sancho notes with awe, there was no human witness.
The narrator through whom we know all that we know
of Don Quixote tells us that when his character decided
to become a knight he looked around for a make-believe
beloved just as he looked for a sword and helmet; but
the same narrator gives a careful reader all the information he needs to see that Alonso Quixano has been
secretly and hopelessly in love with Aldonza Lorenzo for
twelve years (I.1,I.25). The narrator mocks Don Quixote's speech about the Golden Age as nonsense which
only occurs to him by an association with acorns (I.11),
but the goatherds to whom it is addressed are moved by
Don Quixote's eloquent respect for their way oflife, and
repay him with all the gifts in their power. When Don
Quixote defends Marcela (I.14), the beautiful girl who
chooses not to marry anyone, the narrator tells us that
he is playing at defending a damsel in distress, but anyone
who listens to what he says will hear him give the reason
for which he became Don Quixote: that beauty demands
a response from us, an effort not to possess it but to be
worthy of it.
Cervantes writes in the guise of someone who never
sees the things that matter amid events he describes in
meticulous detail. In belittling his hero, Cervantes belittles
himself, and it is left to us to discover whether we are
cut to the measure of that same littleness. It is a simple
rhetorical trick that Cervantes plays, gently manipulating
his readers by appealing to our vanity, our pleasure in
feeling superior to the stupid narrator by seeing things
to which his coarse sight does not penetrate. A most
generous author, we are dealing with, who allows us for
the most part to indulge in superior laughter at the crazy
knight and the gullible squire, and still to have someone
tO look down on when we see those characters more
deeply and truly.
The narrator's misunderstandings begin practically
on the first page of this book, when he tells us that the
gentleman about whom he is writing has gone crazy. It
is certainly the most widely held opinion among those
who meet Don Quixote, but there are three exceptions.
In Part two, three sensible people come to know him and
come to other conclusions about his sanity. Don Diego
de Miranda, the gentleman in the green greatcoat,
decides that Don Quixote is "a crazy sane man and an
insane one on the verge of sanity" (II.17). And later, at
an inn, which he takes for an inn, when he is on his way
to Saragossa, Don Quixote meets Don Juan and Don
Jeronimo, who are finally unable "to make up their minds
as to just where they were to place him in the vague realm
between sound sense and madness" (II.59). It is no ac-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
cident that this pair of judgments is made available to
us, for together they mean that the categories mad and
sane break down when applied to Don Quixote. He must
be said to belong to both, or to neither. He is unlike other
men, but the distinction between the mad and the sane
does not illuminate that difference.
The truly illuminating distinction is given to us by
Don Quixote himself, whose judgment is always the most
trustworthy in the book. When the gentleman in green
is worrying about what to make of his companion, Don
Quixote 6'llesses his thoughts, and breaks in on them in
a kindly way. He forgives his friend for thinking him
foolish and mad, and does his best to explain why he does
what he does. "Even as it is easier for the prodigal to
become a generous man than it is for the miser, so is
it easier for the foolhardy to become truly brave than
it is for the coward to attain valor. And in this matter
of adventures, you may believe me, Sefior Don Diego,
it is better to lose by a card too many than a card too few."
Prodigality, we shall see as we go on, is one of the
most important words in the book. When Don Quixote
appears ridiculous, which is most of the time, it is not
for lack of wits but for his deliberate choice to be prodigal. With what is he prodigal? With money, of course,
but with all the things that constitute himself. When, in
his fiftieth year, Alonzo Quixano became Don Quixote,
it was not because his brain dried up but because he
judged his safe and settled life to be a miserly one, a driedup life. From that time on he ceased to hoard his
capacities to act, to befriend, and to benefit. He gives
his reason for doing so again and again in a single word,
the most important word in the book: gratitude. As he
says to one of the shepherdesses in Part two, "My profession is nothing other than showing gratitude" (II.58).
Gratitude is the reciprocal response to grace. In his
discourse on arms and letters (1.37), Don Quixote explains that the highest achievement of human letters and
learning is distributive justice. He has chosen instead the
higher calling of the soldier, which aims at bestowing the
grace of peace. The middle-aged Alonzo Quixano decided
to stop living a life which received grace but returned
none.
In Part two, Don Quixote asserts that the greatest
sin is not pride but ingratitude. This has already been
shown in Part one. The whole of Don Quixote is a parable,
and its first part contains two parables-within-a-parable.
The captive's story is constructed as the parable of the
prodigal father; ingratitude is revealed in the parable of
the curious impertinent. While Don Quixote sleeps in
the inn to which he is taken from the Sierra Moreno,
his companions read aloud a story about a man who is
curious about the wrong things. His name is Anselmo.
Let us listen to him describe his complaint to his friend
Lotario (1.33).
"You may think, my friend, that in return for the
favors God has shown me by giving me such parents as
mine and bestowing upon me with no stinting hand what
are commonly known as the gifts of nature as well as
3
�those of fortune, I should never be able to thank Him
enough, not to speak of what He has done for me by
giving me you as a friend and Camila for my wife ....
Yet with all these advantages ... I lead the most empty
and fretful existence of any man in this universe. . ..
The thing that so tortures me is the desire to know
whether or not my wife Camila is as good and perfect
as I think she is, for this is a truth that I cannot accept
until the quality of her virtue is proved to me in the same
manner that fire brings out the purity of gold. For it is
my opinion, my friend, that a woman is virtuous only
in the degree to which she is tempted and resists temptation."
Can you hear why he is called Anselmo? I will remind you of the words of Saint Anselm in the first chapter
of the Proslogium.
"Lord, thou art my God, and thou art my Lord, and
never have I seen thee. It is thou that hast made me, and
hast made me anew, and hast bestowed upon me all the
blessings I enjoy; and yet I do not know thee. Finally,
I was created to see thee, and not yet have I done that
for which I was made."
"0 wretched lot of man, when he hath lost that for
which he was made! ... We suffer want in unhappiness,
and feel a miserable longing, and alas! We remain empty
. . . . I wished to smile in the joy of my mind, and I
am compelled to frown by the sorrow of my heart.
Gladness was hoped for, and lo! a source of frequent
sighs!"
Anselm puts an end to the torment in his soul by finding a proof of the existence of God, but Anselmo, who
also cannot enjoy blessings which rest only on faith, when
he seeks proof of Camila's love, destroys his own life and
those of everyone around him.
Anselmo insists that Lotario try to seduce Camila,
and try again and again while Anselmo keeps himself
absent from her. Since no human quality is infinite, and
since every time Camila resists temptation Anselmo
causes it to be increased, and since he himself is never
present to his wife to help her be his wife, Anselmo finally
achieves the only result that can come from his actions.
He makes Camila unfaithful. He does not prove her unfaithful, because she was not so until he made her so.
A wife's love is not a neutral fact to be ascertained by
experiment, but a living thing sustained in part by her
husband's faith in it. When Anselmo decides that his faith
is an insufficient foundation for his marriage, he loses
it, because there is no foundation other than faith for
a marriage to rest on. And it is important (Cervantes
underlines the importance by breaking the story off) that
the marriage continues for a while on a foundation of
deceit. The deception does not last because Camila's maid
joins in it, and the chain of corruption inevitably
lengthens until it pulls all of them down.
Anselmo's curiosity is impertinent or misplaced
because a wife's love calls not fo.r curiosity but for
gratitude. In his inability to appreciate the wife he has,
Anselmo removes himself from her, so that she has no
4
husband and he has no wife. The subsequent infidelity
and deaths only turn into fact the truth that was already
present in Anselmo's lack of faith. Don Quixote's village
priest pronounces the story implausible (1.35), proving,
for one of the innumerable times in the book, that he
does not know how to read a story. Every marriage is
founded on faith alone, but it is the unlikely and imaginary story of Anselmo that reveals that truth. And
once one has gotten hold of the truth behind the implausible facts, one sees that it is a truth about more than just
marriages. At that point Cervantes' story comes into its
own as a parable.
The story of the curious impertinent illuminates the
larger story of Don Quixote, but the characters in the
one do not stand for characters in the other. That is not
the nature of a parable. The myths Socrates tells in Platds
dialogues are intended to be interpreted, to be destroyed
as stories and transformed into their philosophical content. They have no use but to invite interpretation. The
allegory Dante tells in the Divine Comedy is always speaking of two or more things at once. The principal story
holds together as itself, but its principal meaning depends
upon the recognition of allegorical counterparts. A
parable differs from both. Its content is not intended to
refer to anything but itself. It is told because someone
who understands it will be in a position to think about
some other subject which is the teller's chief concern, and
because anyone who cannot understand it would not be
able to get anything out of any direct talk about that matter of chief concern. The parable draws on things close
to one's experience, to prepare the imagination to deal
with things less familiar.
The parable of the curious impertinent reveals that
there are things in the world which are invisible except
to the eyes of faith, things which genuinely exist but can
be destroyed if they are not believed in. In an important
exchange immediately preceding the reading of the story
of the curious impertinent, the priest declares that there
never were knights errant in the world. The innkeeper
replies that he knows there are none now, but that they
surely lived in those days. Sancho worries that one of them
might be right, but makes up his mind to wait and see.
If there is a knight errant in the world, only Sancho will
have his eyes open to see him.
Don Quixote's first encounter, the first time he leaves
home, is with two whores at an inn (1.2). He sees gracious
ladies, and addresses them with courtesy. Their first
response is coarse and cruel laughter. If the scene ended
like that, we would have to agree with the narrator that
Don Quixote suffers from delusions and sees not what
is in front of him but what he wants to see. But something
happens while no one is looking, and when we return
from the stables with the innkeeper, we find the young
women treating Don Quixote with kindness and bearing themselves with modesty. They have become the
gracious ladies that no one, including themselves, except
Don Quixote, saw them as. It is a very small and very
important event, even if it has no lastirig effect on the
WINTER 1985
�women's lives. For a short time at least, they were not
the sluts they had thought themselves to be, but free beings, capable of accepting and returning courtesy. Their
graciousness was nowhere to be seen until Don Quixote's
faith and their works brought it into being, but he saw
it while it was still nothing but possibility.
Do you see the connection with Anselmo? He
doubted the virtue his wife had, and thereby destroyed
it. Don Quixote believes in the virtues the two women
do not have, and thereby brings them into being.
Anselmo withdraws himself from his wife. Don Quixote
involves himself with total strangers. Anselmo does not
know how to love the woman he is in love with. Don
Quixote may have the secret of loving everyone in the
world.
But Don Quixote's subsequent acts of charity, with
the boy Andres and with the convicts, seem to be not
mad but naive, a mockery of the very notion of doing
good. When he prevents Andres from being beaten, and
leaves his master on his honor to pay the boy his just
wages, the result is the worst beating Andres has had in
his life, and the loss of his job. When Andres tells him
what has happened, and curses him for it, Don Quixote
is deeply troubled. When he frees the convicts, it is Don
Quixote who is beaten, by the very men he tried to help,
and robbed of everything he carries and wears. It is that
episode which sends him into the mountains, where, for
a time, he is not himself. For the narrator, there is nothing
troubling about these results. They merely confirm what
every grown-up in the world except Don Quixote already
knows. For Don Quixote they are severe tests of his faith
in people, but tests which he survives, and rightly.
Don Quixote has benefitted Andres by forcing an end
to a situation in which the boy regarded himself as someone who could be beaten at the whim of another, so long
as the beating was not too bad. Like the two whores,
Andres had taken himself at the valuation of others. They
are startled to be taken for ladies. Andres is angry at being forced to be a man. We see him last on the road to
Seville. We do not know what will become of him there,
but we know that it will be what he makes of himself.
Andres had accepted and made the best of a slavish role
into which he was born and in which he was remaining
by inertia. From Don Quixote he suffered the painful
gift of his freedom.
With the convicts, Don Quixote worries that some
might be innocent, convicted only because they were poor
and without friends. Others he sees to be guilty, but of
no very serious crimes. But his motive for freeing them
does not depend on the facts about them. Don Quixote
is outraged that, whatever they have done, the king should
make slaves of them. Don Quixote believes in punishment; he spends much of the book dealing it out. But
he does not believe in punishment that precludes
forgiveness. The king's justice rests on the ultimate in
impertinent curiosity: on the question whether a man
shall be allowed to continue to be a man or shall be
created a slave. The convicts had not used their freedom
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
well, but they had it not on human sufferance but by
God's grace. Don Quixote does not find a solution to the
problem of human ingratitude, but he does prevent its
multiplication, and hence rights a wrong.
'I'he two craziest of Don Quixote's deeds in Part one
seem not explicable as acts of faith or charity, because
they do not involve other people. They are his attacks
on the windmills and the sheep. There is a clue to the
meaning of these episodes in Part two, when Don Quixote
tells Sancho, "In confronting giants, it is the sin of pride
that we slay" (II.S). I suspect that, in attacking both the
windmills and the sheep, Don Quixote was ineffectually,
but literally, confronting giants- private companies of
great wealth which, under royal patent, were exploiting
the land of Spain on a gigantic and unheard-of scale. One
windmill is sufficient to knock Don Quixote off his horse,
but it is a clump of thirty or forty of them at which he
charges in anger. And it is not a flock or herd of sheep
at which he charges, but a vast assemblage of them to
which his word army is appropriate. There must be
wrong with the unbounded commercial development that
is beginning to change the face of Spain, because it is
founded on pride. On the other hand, every deed of Don
Quixote rests on faith in the Gospels. It should be becoming clear in what way the story of Don Quixote is itself
a parable.
At this point I have just about made good my claim
that Don Quixote's actions in Part one are all understandable and good. I have not mentioned several encounters
in which he gives and receives lumps and bruises. The
most serious injury he causes is a broken leg, to an arrogant young priest who speaks rudely and treats him as
though he were nothing. {I.19) Until he is in pain and
unable to move, Alonso Lo_pez is too wrapped up in
himself to recognize Don Quixote as another like himself
to whom elementary courtesy is due. And as soon as Don
Quixote sees that the man needs help, he is quick to give
it. Alonso Lopez has learned his own importance from
his theological education, but he has not learned who
his neighbor is. If he is capable of! earning such a lesson
at all, both the anger and the kindness of the crazy knight
could teach it to him.
Don Quixote is meddlesome, but his meddling always
takes the form of pertinent curiosity. Though he talks often
of the privileges of rank, he acts always as though every
human being deserves honor. He is entitled to teach manners to a priest, to insist that the king accord even a
criminal minimal recognition as a member of his own
species,- to require a master to treat his servant with
respect, to make that servant and prostitutes aware of
their own dignity, and even to strike a few blows at gigantic faceless companies which do their business in indifference to what they do to the world they share with ordinary people. Don Quixote earns the right to interfere
with everyone by recognizing every human life as a claim
upon himself. His curiosity is pertinent because when
the test comes he always acts as though the good of
another pertains to him. And we are entitled to wonder
5
�All of which I will make plain to him, to the
if, in Don Quixote, we are witnessing a man who loves
of a whore.
his neighbor as himself.
When Don Quixote enters the Sierra Moreno he is
far from believing that he has done anything worthwhile,
but his influence is already present in the world and working its own effects. He himself is miserable and alone.
He spends his time imitating the penance of Amadis of
fullest extent, with my sword.' "
Soon Don Quixote is drawing Sancho ahead of the
others they are travelling with, to question him in insa-
tiable detail about Dulcinea. As always, Sancho's
disloyalty has strengthened Don Quixote's faith, and Don
Quixote's healing anger at his squire has strengthened
Gaul, an episode noteworthy because it makes one realize
Sancho's devotion to his master. Those two are then
that nowhere else in the book does he imitate anyone.
Only in this brief, dark retirement from the world does
Don Quixote ever try to remember something a knight
in a book did in order to mimic it. Ordinarily he is the
wholly themselves, while those riding along behind them
opposite of an imitator, the most original of men, in the
nobleman Don Fernando, who has run away from home
sense that his deeds originate in himself out of the true
array of possibilities before him. It is the rest of us, who
has ended up in the Sierra Moreno in despair, is now
have, without knowing it, become new beings in Don
Quixote's image.
Dorotea, who has been seduced and deserted by the
and twice trusted men who then tried to rape her, who
judge and act out of habit, custom, and inertia, who are
in the company of three new knights-errant. Don
the imitators. The enchantment of which Don Quixote
speaks is primarily the siren song of habit which prevents
us from truly encountering the things and people before
us. We take them for what everyone else always takes
them for. In a chapter which Cervantes calls" one of the
most important in the entire history" (II.6), Don Quixote's niece tells him to act like what he is, a man who
Quixote's curate and barber, who, contemptuous of his
behavior but concerned for his welfare, have come hunt-
is old, sick, and poor. In the Sierra Moreno, that is just
society, has regained his sanity and hopes, and sworn
how he acts.
that Don Fernando will either marry Dorotea or fight
him. Two men for whom the idea of chivalry is matter
only for mockery, but who are in the Sierra Moreno on
When Sancho returns to him in the mountains, he
finds his master thinner than ever, jaundiced, fainting
from hunger, and sighing for Dulcinea. But when he tries
to speak to him of his beloved, Don Quixote will only
say that he is not worthy of her grace (I.29). When his
priest, for a joke, says he has heard of a mad sinner who
will undoubtedly be damned for setting free some galley
slaves, Don Quixote hangs his head in silent humiliation. It is his wonderful friendship with Sancho that
brings him back to himself. Here is the colloquy which
brings him out of his melancholy and restores his sanity.
(I.30)
"'Faith, Seiior Licentiate; (said Sancho,) 'the one who
performed that deed was my master. Not that I didn't
warn him beforehand and advise him to look what he
was doing, it being a sin to free them, for they were all
of them the greatest rogues that ever were: "
" 'Blockhea,d!' cried Don Quixote upon hearing this.
'It is not the business of knights-errant to stop and ascer-
tain as to whether the afflicted and oppressed whom they
encounter going along the road in chains like that are
in such straits by reason of their own crimes or as a result
ing for their friend to bring him home, have found
themselves distracted by Dorotea's distress, and each has
sworn himself to her service (!.28,29). Cardenio, who has
also been misused by Don Fernando, and had run away
to the Sierra Moreno to escape his troubles and all human
account of Don Quixote, and two despairing victims, who
are brought out of their solitude by Don Quixote's friends,
are now a band united by mutual faith, by the giving
and receiving of charity, and by the hope that life may
still hold some unlooked-for good for a young woman
in distress. The four of them connive at an elaborate
pretense of knight-errantry to patronize Don Quixote,
while none of them notices that they are living the actuality of it.
For the remainder of Part one, Don Quixote sleeps,
listens, holds back from disputes to be a peacemaker,
allows himself to be carried homeward in a cage, and,
after one abortive attempt in the last chapter to return
to knight-errantry, chooses the prudent course of returning home to await more propitious times. He, the most
active of men, is for the most part con,tent with his return
to passivity. We are never told why directly, but Cervantes
shows us why through the Captive's story, which is Cervantes' parable of the prodigal father.
Luke's story of the prodigal son begins with a young
of misfortunes that they have suffered. The only thing
man's heedlessness of others, the Captive's story with his
that does concern them is to aid those individuals as persons in distress, with an eye to their sufferings and not
to their villainies. I chanced to meet with a rosary, or
father's heedlessness of self. Each leads to the premature
distribution of an estate. The prodigal father, worried
that he will waste what he has, sells his lands, divides
string, of poor wretches and merely did for them what
my religion demands of me. As for the rest, that is no
affair of mine. And whoever thinks ill of it- saving the
dignity of your holy office and your respected person,
Senor Licentiate- I will simply say that he knows little
of the laws of chivalry and lies like an ill-begotten son
6
the proceeds among his sons, and sends them out into
the world. One pursues trade, and becomes wealthy; a
second pursues letters, and eventually becomes a judge.
The Captive, in the image of his father, becomes a knight.
After twenty-two years the family is reunited, the father's
faith justified, the wealth he denied himself multiplied,
WINTER 1985
�the sons whose presence he sacrificed returned to him
freely out of love. But this summary of the story leaves
out the most important character in it, the Moorish
maiden Zoraida. When the prodigal father lets go of his
property and his sons, he cannot know that a stranger
is waiting in the world whom only his deed will save.
Of the many quixotic characters in Don Quixote, the
most quixotic of them all is the Moorish princess Zoraida,
who cannot take any pleasure from wealth, a loving
father, or the society of her own people, because in her
childhood she heard stories of the Virgin Mary from a
Christian slave. She gives up everything to go with the
Christian knight to a country where the Virgin Mary
is worshipped. Upbringing, language, heritage, custom,
and ritual do not produce faith in Zoraida; the inspiration of the imagination by stories does. The prodigality
of the Captive's father, and of the Captive himself, who
returns most of his inheritance and embarks on a soldier's
life, · make possible her rescue from a country not
hospitable to her spirit. The band of knights-errant
descended from Don Quixote, and already enlarged, gives
her that reception to a Christian country of which she
has dreamed.
Between Don Quixote's return to the inn and the
Captive's arrival there, four more lives have been saved
from unhappiness. Don Fernando, who arrived breathing
threats and murder at Luscinda, who betrayed him after
he had betrayed Cardenio and Dorotea for her sake, has
relented and amended his life, making it possible for
Cardenio and Luscinda to marry, and returning himself
to Dorotea. Don Fernando's conversion is brought about
by the unanimous and whole-hearted urging of the group
in the inn, which includes the curate and barber, now
involved in the lives of others by the same pertinent
curiosity that took Don Quixote away from his home.
As Zoraida was waiting in the world for the liberating
act of the prodigal father, so, it turns out, was Dorotea,
lost, alone, and in danger in the Sierra Moreno, waiting
for the liberating, infectious generosity of Don Quixote.
She acknowledges as much, when, finally abandoning
all pretense with Don Quixote, she ~ays to him, "I am
convinced that had it not been for you, sir, I should never
have had the good fortune that is now mine, and in this
I speak the veriest truth, as most of these worthy folk who
are present can testify." (I.3 7) The long chain of entangled
lives which extends to the Captive's brother's teenaged
daughter and her boyfriend, which is linked in mutual
generosity to realize the highest possibilities of each,
which is the exact inverse of the chain of corruption extending from Anselmo, owes its existence to Don Quixote. In the parable surrounding the parable, he is the
prodigal father.
Don Quixote, having chosen not to hoard the grace
his own life contained, made it available ih unpredictable
ways to people unknown to him. Contributing also to
that transmission is, of course, an immense element of
coincidence, as, one after another, nine people who are
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
in various ways making one another unhappy arrive at
the same place. But perhaps coincidence is one of those
categories under which things appear to our enchanted
sight as other than they are. Cardenio and Dorotea are
both in the Sierra Moreno because it is the place of
despair, but they are not there together until Don Quixote's friends bring them together. Until that time, the
latent truth that their interests coincide cannot become
a fact, and that is why they are in despair. The coincidence of their connection with each other only has consequences in the world when the utterly disinterested
curate and barber choose to make their cares coincide
with those of two strangers. Similarly, the Captive and
his brother might have spent the night at the same inn
without knowing it, had Don Quixote's friends not been
there to ask each for his story, and to involve themselves
in those stories. If the truth of coincidence is that all lives
coincide, then the fact of coincidence ceases to be surprising. Arrival at the inn where the steadily multiplying good will begotten by Don Quixote works its effects
is for Don Fernando "like attaining Heaven itself, where
all the misadventures of earth are at an end" (I.36). In
contrast to Don Fernandds way of recognizing the truth
behind the facts, Don Quixote's taking the same inn for
a castle is modest understatement.
I have said that Don Quixote does not do anything
in Part one after he frees the convicts. He is present in
the subsequent deeds as the Captive's father is present
in the lives of his sons, in just the measure that they are
independent of him. But it is now necessary for me to
qualify what I've said, because Don Quixote, for a brief
moment in Chapter forty-five, does something important. He leads an army. He leads it in a conflict in which
no one is hurt because he quickly puts a stop to the
fighting. But it is an episode in which, while nothing happens, the participants reveal themselves for what they are.
It is thus like those Platonic dialogues which Mr. Klein
has called ethological mimes. Before describing the
episode I will mention two others of the same kind from
earlier in this book.
In Chapter four, during that first brief sally in which
the whole truth of Don Quixote can be read, he encounters some Toledo merchants on their way to buy silk.
For a moment they stand opposed, Don Quixote commanding them to swear that Dulcinea is the most
beautiful woman in the world, one of the merchants insisting that they be shown her, or at least her portrait,
before being required to commit themselves. In anger,
thoroughly provoked by the rude jokes of one of the merchants, Don Quixote lowers his lance and charges. As
happens as often as not with Rocinante, his horse
stumbles, and he is a loser without combat. But Don
Quixote on the ground, beaten by servants, with the merchants on their horses, laughing in a slightly embarrassed
way, is just the enchanted appearance, the merely factual outcome of the episode. The truth of it is one man
understanding that the beauty that is worth declaring
7
�and defending is the beauty that is invisible, while a group
of others think of the beauty of a beloved woman as they
do of the quality of a sample of silk. It is the soul of a
knight and the soul of a merchant that are set before us.
In Chapter twenty, Don Quixote and Sancho run
afoul of another phase of the textile industry, the sounds
of the hammers of a fulling mill. I am disregarding Don
Quixote's advice in speaking of it. "I do not deny;' he says,
"that what happened to us has its comical aspects; but
it is best not to tell the story, for not everyone is wise
enough to see the point of the thing:' The point of the
thing is that Don Quixote is truly brave, because he is
effects of such books. But what, exactly, are those harmful
effects? Four chapters of the text are devoted to a mammoth debate on the subject (1.47-50). The curate, of
course, contributes his characteristic argument that such
books foster mistaken notions among the uneducated
about the facts of the past. People might even be moved
by accounts of miracles which never happened. But a
new character, more elevated in the hierarchy of the
Church, a canon of Toledo, is introduced to carry the
principal responsibility for exposing the evils of the books
which have corrupted Don Quixote.
brave in the dark. The fact of the matter is that he, like
It is not right, the canon argues, that amusement ever
be entirely separated from instruction, and not possible
Sancho, spent a night in terror of something that could
not harm them, and had to endure Sancho's laughter in
events in an episodic presentation and a crude style. The
the morning. But does one who fears in the night have
the right to mock in the daylight? Night will always come
again, and will hold terrors, and Don Quixote has proved
that he can face them with courage. The revelation of
courage does not require a solemn occasion; for those
with eyes to see, it is compatible with events that are
ridiculous.
In Chapter forty-five, as in the flaring of a match or
a lightening-bolt, there is the briefest of military
engagements: the battle over Mambrinds helmet. The
battle has no outcome because Don Quixote does not
allow it to. The point of the thing is the drawing of a
line between the two sides, and the revealing of the
genuine willingness of each to fight. There is no issue
present worth fighting over, as Don Quixote says. But
there is the utmost importance in discovering for what
one is willing to fight. On one side is an army of police,
peasants, and servants, fighting in defense of the proposition that a barber's basin is a barber's basin and belongs
by right to the barber. On the other side is an army of
caballeros, Don Luis, Don Fernando, the judge, and their
natural and rightful leader, Don Quixote. One combatant seems to be on the wrong side, for Sancho Panza
fights with the knights. But Sancho is no longer the
cowardly peasant of twenty-five chapters earlier. Just five
pages before the battle begins, Don Quixote has noted
that Sancho has become a true man, and deserves to be
dubbed a knight. (I. 44) The knights fight to defend the
that pleasure could come from books that depict unlikely
canon knows that the books of knight-errantry violate
all these rules of good writing, because he has begun
reading practically all of them that have ever been printed.
In fact, he has enjoyed reading every one of them, but
has always caught himself in time to remind himself that
they are worthless, and incapable of affording true
pleasure. He has never allowed himself to finish reading
one. He once tried writing one himself, which observed
all the rules of good writing, but he left it unfinished when
he realized that most people wouldn't like it. Now the
canon is an honest man, and if he were to hear his opinions presented as briefly as this and all in one place, he
would find himself as peculiar as he finds Don Quixote.
Spread over twenty pages, and supported with abundant
examples, his discourse is in fact very impressive.
Don Quixote, of course, mops the floor with him,
but listen to the surprising way he does it. " Do you mean
to tell me that those books that ... are read with general
enjoyment and praised by young and old alike, by rich
and poor, the learned and the ignorant, the gentry and
the plain people- in brief, by all sorts of persons of every
condition and walk in life- do you mean to tell me that
they are but lies? Do they not have every appearance of
being true?" Don Quixote does not say that the books
are good, but that they are true. What is true about them?
They are in touch with the deepest springs of our common humanity. There are incessant references in the book
to the truthfulness of histories, by which everyone else
proposition that honor exists wherever one stakes one's
honor, even in the homeliest of objects. Don Quixote's
means some sort of authoritative assurance of a matching-
dignity elevates the barber's basin, just as his love elevates
Dulcinea above the sight of merchants and his courage
elevates a fuller's mill beyond the comprehension of a
coward. For the only time in the book, Don Quixote has
an army to lead, and the one thing he does with it, the
instant it comes into being, is disband it. The battle he
fights is against the automatic taking of the things in the
ote sees that a more important truth lies in what mat-
world at their lowest valuation, and it is both won and
lost as soon as the sides are drawn.
Don Quixote has learned to see the possibilities which
do not appear and the truths which facts never disclose
by reading books of knight-errantry. Cervantes, of course,
claims that he wrote Don Quixote to combat the harmful
8
up with a dead and inaccessible past. Only Don Quixches up with the buried longings and unrealized
possibilities in all of us.
Cervantes' discourse remains parabolic, but it is time
for our own to become direct. The effect, harmful or
otherwise, of books of knight-errantry, is not the subject of chief concern. The canon, showing the monstrous
improbabilities the romances ask us to swallow, mentions
a seventeen-year-old boy killing a giant, an army of a
million men defeated because the book's hero is on the
other side, and a tower full of knights miraculously scattered all over the earth, and concludes that books full
of such things have no place in a Christian state. Is it
WINTER 1985
�not clear that the canon is talking of one thing while
Cervantes is thinking of another, and that the name of
that other is the Bible? The canon tells Don Quixote to
turn to the Book of Judges if he wants to read about
knightly exploits, attributing its superiority to its accuracy. But even if the story of Samson and Delilah is
more factual than that of Amadis of Gaul, does the worth
of the Bible depend on its quota of facts?
In the first chapter of Part two, Don Quixote gives
a lesson in how to read, which is wasted on his audience
of the curate and the barber. He says, "the truth is so
clear that I can almost assure you that I saw with my
own eyes Amadis of Gaul?' Is Don Quixote talking about
be willing to let him die. We are left alone at the end
of Part two, in a way that we are not at the end of Part
one. We have only ourselves to rely on, and no longer
Don Quixote, to assimilate and come to terms with our
encounter with him. If we are to carry away anything
of importance from that encounter, it must survive a
passage through his inexplicable abandonment of
everything he believed. But Cervantes is too good a
storyteller to make even half a book entirely painful to
his best and most trusting readers. He gives as compensation for our ordeal Sancho Panza, for Part two is
Sancho's book.
With the many ways in which Don Quixote and
amusement? About instruction? Those two categories do
Sancho are obvious opposites, one is apt not to notice
not exhaust the purposes of writing, and it is only because
the canon thinks they do that he is so confused about
his own experiences with books. Stories that affect us set
how much they are alike. Each has left home and submitted himself to adventure and the workings of providence, Don Quixote because he longs to be
acknowledged and accepted by Dulcinea, Sancho because
he longs for an island, where he would be an important
man, see his children honored, and not have to do any
our imaginations to work. That activity can disclose
ourselves to us: what we care about, what we fear, what
we long for. The combination of disclosure and stimulation may, as it does with Don Quixote, inspire action.
Even when it doesn't, it may enrich the interior realm
from which thought and action can be nourished. It is
not possible for a work of fiction to relieve boredom for
a time, and then vanish as though it had not been.
Because the work of ou·r imaginations is an indispensable
partner in the presentation to us of a work of fiction,
reading or listening to one is always an experience which
must leave some mark. Under the word fiction I include
history, if it is formed into stories.
It follows, then, that stories cannot be received by us
passively or identically. And finally, it follows that the
Bible cannot be what it is, mostly stories, and be
understood for the many by a learned few who would
control the rightness of beliefs. In our vulnerability to
stories, we are all alike, and the canon cannot rise above
his own humanity. In our response to stories, where the
possibility of faith lies, we are independent and free, and
the canon cannot rise above us. Cervantes' book is a
parable of faith, written at the time of an Inquisition.
You may have noticed that I have not had much to
say about Part two, and you must realize by now that
I am not going to. In fact, I have used Part two as though
it were Cervantes' commentary on Part one. It is more
than that. In it, Cervantes magnifies Don Quixote's
mistakes, failures, doubts, and miseries, so that we will
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
work. Within their enormous sameness, their differences
make their friendship the most stable of self-maintaining
communities. When they pull against each other it is
always for the sake of the same goal, that grace without
which a life, whether devoted to honor or to pleasure,
is incomplete. In the course of his companionship, his
fights, and his reconciliations with Don Quixote, Sancho acquires habits which will sustain his quixotic long;
ings after he has lost his friend.
He has progressively become brave enough to fight
in defense of his master (I.24), alongside his master (I.45),
and finally in rebellion from his master (II.60). He has
likewise absorbed enough of his master's wisdom that he
is able, on his own in charge of his inland island, to resolve
a paradox that would defeat Bertrand Russel (II. 51). But
most important of all, association with Don Quixote has
liberated Sancho's imagination. What Sancho sees from
the flying horse Clavileno has nothing to do with knighterrantry, since his imagination has been differently
nourished than has Don Quixote's. A mustard seed from
the Gospels, some garbled astronomy, and memories of
his boyhood as a goatherd combine in Sancho's visions
(II.41). With the eyes of an imagination thoroughly his
own, set free in him by Don Quixote, Sancho sees that
his longing is for no earthly island (II.42).
As Don Quixote is a lover of honor, so is Sancho a
lover of pleasure, with sufficient imagination always to
be grateful and never to be satisfied.
9
�Politics and the Imagination
Eva Brann
T
he topic "Politics and the Imagination" is at
once larger and more restricted than "Politics
and the Arts;' the theme of this Tocqueville
Forum.* It is more restricted because I mean
to exclude the practical problem of the relation between the arts and public life. Indeed, by politics
I mean here not the working processes by which public
affairs are carried on, but a fundamental sphere of human
interest, namely that which is concerned with the wellbeing of a whole civic community as a whole. I think
that in this country even politicians in the narrow sense,
who are absorbed in the machinations of power, have
some inkling of this meaning of politics, while it plays
a large role in the thinking of all people who regard
themselves as citizens.
On the other hand, the topic "Politics and the Imagination" is larger than "Politics and the Arts" because,
although almost all works of art are works of the imagination, not all imagining actually results in works of art;
fOr example, dreams and daydreams have no actual
product.
I should also say what I mean by the imagination. I
take the term for present purposes in the most basic of
its usual senses, namely, as our ability for forming interior images, for envisioning eventful scenes and peopled
places. Such interior sights must certainly be derived from
exterior perceptions, but our imagination reshapes them
and infuses them with feeling. This is not the place to
'This essay was commissioned by the Tocqueville Forum of Wake Forest University for the 1983-84 series on 'Politics and the Arts: Robert Utley, director.
Publication of the series in a book is planned.
Eva Brann is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
10
pursue the fascinating philosophical analysis of our
strange ability for forming an interior world, except to
mention one of its important characteristics: the imagination is often thought of as a mediating faculty between
our blind desires and our directed activity, a testing
ground in which we shape our wishes into images and
prepare them for execution as works in the material
world.
This imaginative faculty seems to me to have a
definite, although limited, relation to politics. Most
political reflection is concerned with the relation between
hUman passion and human reasoning, with what we want
and how we contrive to get it. Of course, these activities
often bring the imagination into play, but they are not
specifically imaginative; they do not have their origin in
the imagination.
It seems to me, however, that there are two definite
ways in which the imagination as such has to do with
politics, corresponding to the two aspects of the imagination as a place for shaping wishes and as a ground for
planning works. In the first case the image remains an
unrealized dream, essentially interior;' in the second case
it is externalized and becomes a work of art.
The first case is exemplified by that peculiarly political
product of the wishful imagination, the utopia. A utopia
is an imagined political community, where the emphasis
is on the fact that it is imagined; it may be presented in
words, but in words which depict, which are images. That
is to say, a utopia is not a mere conception of reason
(though its life may be presented as eminently
reasonable), but the depiction of a wished-for community,
communicated with as much vivid detail as the author
can make plausible. It is a city painted in words.
A utopia will, .of course, present itself as the imagined incarnation of the author's ideas, but that is part
of an illusionistic technique used by utopian authors: at
WINTER 1985
�bottom it is not the image which follows the idea, but
the idea which was distilled from a vivid dream.
Now insofar as the utopian image is written down
in a book, the dream is, to be sure, externalized and
worked up. Nonetheless, utopias are in their very nature not
works of art, or at least they are not primarily such, for
what is crucial about art works iS that they are meant
to be the final realization of the maker's internal image,
and fulfillments or ends in themselves. Most utopias, on
the other hand, pretend to be nothing but beginnings,
mere sketches or blueprints for communities to be wished
for in the world. Although it is no proof, it is at least
an indication of this fact that among the score or so of
the best known utopias only one is generally acknowledged to be a work of great literary distinction, namely,
the book that gave its name to the genre, Sir Thomas
More's Utopia. By and large utopias give no more esthetic
satisfaction than does an account of a daydream: the
energy is in the wish, not in the work.
The first part of my talk will therefore be about that
application of the imagination to politics which produces
an imaginary community, a political wishjuljillment.
However, while the utopian imagination shapes and
encompasses imaginary communities, the art-producing
imagination may inform real communities from within.
Thus, the second way the imagination and politics
intersect is precisely insofar as the realized works of the
imagination, that is to say, works of art, become of concern to a political community.
Yet the relation of art to politics seems to me to be
of necessity primarily negatioe. Just as a gardener can only
select the seeds and choose the site, and thereafter can
only water and wait and weed out unwanted growth, so
a community can wishfully choose and encourage certain kinds of art, but it can effectively only exclude and censor what it opposes. Again, a sign of this fact is the exceedingly modest role accorded to works of art in most
utopias: just as they are not generally themselves real
works of art, so they admit such activity only in a very
subdued fashion, for example, in encouraging styles in
the crafts which are in harmony with the communal image. The grander arts, which depend more on individual
gifts, are evidently considered to have too intractable a
relation to the civic community.
The point I am making, that the arts are related to
politics most determinately through censorship, is not
quite the same as a familiar argument made by David
Hume when he lays it down as a principle that it is impossible for the arts and sciences to arise among a people that is not blessed with free government, claiming
that monarchy is positively injurious to the arts. He
himself says that this theory cannot account for a Homer,
and no more can it account for Shakespeare or any great
poet who takes for his subject the incomparably great.
So I am not arguing that political freedom is necessary
to art-a manifest falsehood-but, on a different level,
that a political community can never produce art: it can
only prevent it from coming on the public scene. If politics
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
interests itself in art positively, it must perforce be by way
of censorship.
Accordingly the second part will be concerned with
censorship of the arts in various political settings.
I. Utopia
A utopia is, as I have defined it, an imagined and
imaginary political community, envisioned rather than
conceived, a desire-filled depiction of a well-shaped communallife.
The name "Utopia'' was invented by Thomas More
and is the title of his little book, written in the beginning of the sixteenth century, the first full-blown utopia.
It is a Greek formation and means "No-place." Utopias
are no place in two senses: First, they are inaccessible.
More's Utopia is an island in the New World, but the
playful claim is that its coordinates have been lost; it is,
of course, a fantasy island. Second, it is no place because
it is a community which never could and, as surely, never
should be realized. The author comments at the end of
his fictional narrator's report that, while some Utopian
features are rather to be wished for than expected in
England, yet others are absurd and in themselves unacceptable. It is not hard to discover what features More
built into his fantasy city which are either unrealizable
or undesirable or both. For example, the Utopians live
in handsome houses which are reallocated every decade,
since there is no private property on the island. Now there
are passages in the Utopia itself and in More's other works
which make it clear that he regarded communism as unsanctioned by religion and impractical in this world. But
More's most serious reservations concern not what the
Utopians do but what they are; namely, cheerful pagans,
unwitting Epicureans, unphilosophical followers of all
natural, reasonable pleasures. They worship Mithras, an
ancient Persian sun god, while practicing religious toleration to the point of indifference. Now More was a devout
Christian and a devoted reader of philosophy who could
not and did not approve of these easy opinions and loose
practices for a living polity.
When then did he invent the fantasy? The answer
is that his Utopia is a subtle and revealing exercise in
delineating delightfully a community which might be
good if human beings were natural rather than spiritual
beings, if they had only enemies worse than themselves,
if they had no pride and knew nothing of original sin.
It is instructive to imagine the kind of community such
people might have, and part of the instruction is the faint
repulsion we are expected to feel at the lives of weightless
beings who do not share the fallen condition of real
human creatures. More gives the narrator and discoverer
of the island a Greek name meaning the "Babbler;'
Hythloday, but behind his babble stands the discerning
imagination of the author.
The word "utopia'' is, as a prefatory letter to Utopia
explains, to be heard also in a second way. Utopia means
11
�not only "no-place,'' but also the ('good place;' eu-topia (as
in "eulogi'). For, on the surface, life on the island, with
its fifty square-walled hillside cities in which each house
has a garden, cities watered by pure fresh rivers fronted
by solid piers and spanned by splendid bridges, is secure,
pleasant, and good.
This second aspect of utopia comes to be preponderant in later utopias which are no longer half-ironic images, but real wish-projections, indulgences of the author's
fancy; these are, for all their intended charm, slightly
repellent, as imaginary spaces dominated by someone
else's dreams of perfection always will be.
A fine example of such latter-day utopias is William
Morris's News from Nowhere, written at the end of the last
century. This Victorian Nowhere takes place right in
England, and instead of being unreachable in place it
is inaccessible in time; it is set in the future, but a future
shaped by Morris's nostalgia for a medieval past. It is
in fact a pre-Raphaelite dream, a future to return to. (I
might observe here that writers of utopias naturally
always play with the two .necessary coordinates of reality, space and time, and, having more or less run out
of uncharted lands on earth, they go to future times, and
latterly to outer space; the first futuristic utopia is Mercier's Memoirs de !Jln 2440 of 1770.)
The chief feature of this future-past is the achievement of a perfect integration of human beings and
nature, a m,achineless but productive pastoral, in which
work is pleasure. In fact one of the mild worries of the
Nowhereans is that they may use up their share of work
too quickly. Work is either of the type called "easy-hard;'
namely, healthy outdoor labor, or it is craftsmanship. The
country is gently and tolerantly anti-intellectual. Children
may read books avidly if they must, but this bookwormish affliction is expected to disappear in maturity. Books
were for a time when intelligent people could take no
pleasure in life but had to rely on the imagination of
others. The genuinely amusing work is housebuilding,
gardening and producing craftsrnanlike objects. The
N owhereans are uncompromisingly egalitarian and look
back with a shudder at the old ways when machines were
used for ordinary work while the intelligent elite followed
the higher forms of art.
Morris's Nowhere has in common with More's Utopia
those features which seem to belong to the very nature
of an imaginative polity: its life is somewhat subdued,
pastel-colored, so to speak. Morris acknowledges that passionate extremities may suddenly intrude into the
peaceful pastoral, but these are incidents to be quickly
resolved. Evidently, when the imagination applies itself
to shaping a perfected political community, it naturally
excludes just those eruptions of human extraordinariness
which are the chief occasions for grand art. And, of
course, that makes good sense, since the utopian imagination means to impose a certain coherence of atmosphere,
a pervasive communal tranquility which naturally excludes private outbursts. The political imagination can-
12
not help but bleach out the passions and contract the
private sphere.
Accordingly most utopias are communitarian: More's
Utopia is a tightly organized, rather herdlike, communist
republic. (At least one of its magistracies is an assimilation of an English office to Platds pig city: the lowest title
is that of "sty-ward;' that is, steward.) Morris's Nowhere
is an idyllic socialist anarchy, which is to say that there
is really no political structure to speak of: all problems
are regarded and solved as social problems.
Again, the ways of utopia are apparently inevitably
anti-philosophical, and this feature, too, lies in the nature
of the genre, first, because the imagined city is often
dreamed precisely in opposition to the harsh and difficult
reasonings of the philosophers, and, second, because its
idyllic internal life alleviates those human predicaments
which give rise to troubled quests. Of course, something
similar holds for religion: utopian religions are by and
large exceedingly tranquil since the suffering which intensifies religious feeling has been eliminated. The inventor has, so to speak, pre-empted all the passion and
has led his creatures into the promised land.
Where the two utopias differ most fundamentally is
in the attitude of their authors towards them. More
himself appears in his book as the somewhat sceptical
listener, and as author his stance is one of ironic delight.
Morris, on the other hand, depicts himself as literally
dreaming the dream in which he enters Now here, and,
when he awakes from it, his heart is heavy with nostalgia
for a time that never was. Most post-Morean utopias are,
then, unironic political dreams, and the dream politics
may consist precisely in dreaming of a community
beyond politics.
As political dreams, utopias are naturally shaped
about the intimate preoccupations of their authors, and
one among these is almost intrinsic to utopian imagining. Since utopian writers are themselves inventors and
contrivers of human nature and human environments,
their imaginations are particularly drawn to inventions
and contrivances, in short to technology, which they see
sometimes as a sinister spoiler and sometimes as the
bright savior of political communities.
There are then, first, the wholeheartedly optimistic
utopias of technological process,-whoSe optimism can be
either complexly serious or simple-mindedly shallow.
Early in the seventeenth century Bacon wrote the first
of the positive technological utopias, the New Atlantis. It
is the prototype of a research polity. Its management is
surrounded with slightly sinister mystifications, but
Bacon's insider's awe before the human mastery of nature
which is in the offing is palpable. In the early twentieth
century, on the other hand, H. G. Wells wrote A Modern
Utopia which lightheadedly celebrates an international
technocracy, endlessly on the move but strictly controlled by an ascet~c elite called, infelicitously, the "Samurai."
Morris's News from Nowhere was in fact one sort of reaction to utopian celebrations of technology, namely the
WINTER 1985
�pastoral. But there is also a very different kind of antitechnological utopia, an imaginary community which is
not a dream but a nightmare. This kind of anti-utopia
is not an invention of modern times. Plato depicts such
a place, the mythical island of Atlantis, whose image
Bacon meant to correct in his New Atlantis. The old
Atlantans are the ancient enemies of Athens, corrupt halfdescendants of Poseidon, the god of oceans and earthquakes and city walls. They inhabit a geometrically
circular island surrounded by concentric ditches and built
over with square castles with fantastically devised walls.
These earthmovers keep elephants for bulldozers. Their
island is amazing and awful.
In this century the fear of a now successful technology,
combined with the horror of totalitarian politics, gives
rise to a new political image, an image of the perversion
of the polis, namely a collective of isolated, terrorized,
technologically manipulated, lost souls. By the middle
of our century the number of published utopias stood
at about two hundred and fifty, and the most serious of
these belonged to the new type, which was labelled "dystopia" or "bad-place."The most famous of these are Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World, which imagines an England
genetically manipulated and controlled by an orgiastic
drug, and George Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, which
imagines a thoroughgoing totalitarianism in which
privacy has become a persecuted political sin: there is
no sanctuary from Big Brother's spying eye.
1984 has come and gone. Decades have passed since ·
the publication of 1984 and "dystopia' has not been realized, at least not in the West. It seems to me that the
dystopias themselves have had a small but effective part
in this blessed fact, perhaps primarily by causing intellectuals, whose political imaginations are notoriously weak,
to imagine terror and to learn to cherish what political
blessings they have. Indeed the type of dystopia cannot
help but be in general more effective than eutopia,
because while eutopias are intimate hopes to which an
author tries to win converts, dystopias are projections
of real, fearful possibilities to which the author tries to
open the world's eyes.
But while it is in general the case that utopias have
had minimal political effect, there is a small scale exception to this observation. In the nineteenth century ther.e
flourished in this country, in the New World where
Thomas More and Francis Bacon had once located their
utopias, scores of utopian communities. There were not,
of course, utopias exactly in my sense, both because they
were not, strictly speaking, independent political
communities- they had the American Republic as their
political ground- and because they were not imaginary
but very much flesh and blood. Yet they were usually
based on utopian blueprints, such as those devised by
Owen, Fourier, Cabet. Most of these realized dreams
were brief; many ended in disaster. In fact, the more suc-
as I mentioned, the latter were usually rather insipidly
religious.
Before concluding the section about utopias, I should
say that, once the utopian genre had become established,
it was used to clothe with imagined shapes all sorts of
notions and speculations. There are, for instance,
cosmological utopias in which the community mirrors
a hypothesis of the heavens, psychological utopias which
embody a theory of human control, and ideological
utopias based on issues such as feminism or ecology. The
genre is irrepressible.
Yet, a short generation ago, utopia was declared dead.
It had been discredited too long and in too many ways:
in the nineteenth century by the failures of its many attempted realizations, and, more severely, by the Marxist attack mounted against "utopian" socialism in behalf
of"scientific" historic principles of revolutionary develop-
ment. Utopias are but small-scale editions of the New
Jerusalem, the Communist Manifesto says sarcastically. Thus
in our century its decline has been mourned; bloodied
by the Marxist critique, it was said to have been killed
off by that political pessimism which caused utopia to
be displaced by dystopia. But these reports of utopias
demise are premature. The genre is, as I said, irrepres-
sible. Although the best known recent utopias are rational
constructs, (for example Nozick's libertarian utopia),
romantic, imaginative utopias continue to be written, and
even the founding of utopian communities still goes on.
Prolific as the utopian genre is and, no doubt, will
continue to be, it has not, I have argued, and it cannot
have, much political potency. The reason is inherent in
its origin in the wishful imagination. That makes utopias
finally rather private, even idiosyncratic, and certainly
ungeneralizable constructions. The products of the imagination stand each alone; it is only the intellect which
can discover universals. And therefore, even when there
is wide-spread utopian activity, it cannot have the unity
or coherence of an intellectual movement. Utopian visions
do not reinforce one another, nor dm one imagine utopian
politics arising except under the aegis of a political
framework based on more universal principles, as was
the case for the utopian communities in the United States.
That is not to say that utopian activity is not, just in itself,
therapeutic and vivifying. However, an activity which
matters as an activity, rather than because of its content,
is precisely what we call play, and, in the last analysis,
that is what utopianism is: the imagination at play, as
irrepressible and as salutary as play is a political
recreation.
I want to conclude by mentioning a role the imagination plays in politics in which it is not so spontaneously
inventive as in the construction of imaginary com-
munities, but perhaps correspondingly more powerful.
cessful and long-lived settlements were usually religious
I mean its role as imaginative memory, which contains
our common past and our common beliefs. Most people,
citizens and politicians, who love their country have a
foundations and not primarily social or political utopias;
vision compounded of its founding myths, its pristine
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
13
�principles and its historical high-points, which at crucial
moments informs their political action. This vision is
precisely not utopian because it is not inherently nowhere;
on the contrary it is the ideal behind the here and now,
the potent, practical image of a living political
community.
II. Censorship
When a strong imagination becomes productive and
by means of an adequate technique realizes it works for
their own sake, its products are works of art. Such works
in turn affect and shape the imagination of others. Thus
art, intentionally or unintentionally, enters politics in-
sofar as politics is the sphere of concern with the community as a whole.
Now I have argued that communities are powerless
to elicit the art which seems to them to preserve and
is its worth in itself, apart from rewards?" Next it is
decided that justice is better investigated "writ large." That
is to say, instead of searching for justice in its original
seat, the human being, the interlocutors will construct
a perfectly just political community and then articulate
the meaning of justice. Several books are devoted to the
developmental stages of this city which correspond to the
progressively higher parts of the soul as Socrates discerns
them. The high point of the construction occurs right
in the middle books, the fifth and sixth. It consists first
in the scandalous notion that the governors of the city,
corresponding as they do to the rational part of the soul,
should be philosophers, and then in the detailed description of the philosophical education of these philosopher
kings. There follows an account of the stages of decline
and fall such a city is subject to and their causes in the
souls of the citizens. The Republic ends with a cosmic myth
displaying an answer to the question whether justice is
a worth in itself.
The imagination and its works are discussed twice:
strengthen them, for the productive imagination is simply
not at their disposal. Communities can do but one thing directly
and effectively: they can proscribe aberrant artists and their art.
The classical justification for the control of works of
the imagination is to be found in Plato's dialogue The
Republic, written in the earlier fourth century B.C. It is
on the way to the perfect city (Books II-III) and again,
symmetrically, after its fall (Book X). This last treatment
is the most radical and most fundamental attack on imagining and on art that I know of. It could only make sense
where it occurs, namely, after the philosophical educa-
a twelve-hour-long conversation mainly between Socrates
is explicitly founded on a view of our world as being but
an image of true being; indeed the whole realm of things
present to us is a hierarchy of images from shadows and
mirror images through the natural objects which they
copy and which are in turn only images of their ideal
originals. Accordingly, the education of the guardians
of the city begins by turning the "bringing-up" of the
young into a "bringing-around" (the Greek words are agoge
and peri-agoge), by wrenching them away from absorption in the multitude of seemingly vivid images to those
unique, substantial thought-originals which will teach
them to keep the city harmonious and unified. In the
light of this philosophical understanding of the world,
image-making in general is a distracting and falsifying
and Plato's two brothers. In the course of it, they find
occasion for devising a small political community such
as the Greeks called a polis, a city. (In Greek the dialogue
is actually called Politeia, meaning "political framework;'
or "city-constitution.")
I should point out here that the city of Plato's Republic
is not strictly a utopia. To be sure, it too is "nowhere"
on earth; Socrates refers to it as a "pattern laid up in
heaven:' (In fact, Plato wrote another work containing
a "second-string" constitution meant more for practical
application.) But the city of the Republic differs from a
utopia in not being an imagined place; indeed, it is severely
lacking in imagined detail. It is rather, as Socrates says,
tion of the governors has been set out, for this education
a city "in reason:' an intellectual construct. One of
activity. Since visual images are the exemplary images,
Thomas More's friends, who recognized Utopia as being in a kind of respectful competition with the Republic,
made just this point in his prefatory poems: Plato's city,
he says, is a philosophical invention and full of philosophy
Socrates attacks particularly painters and, by implication, sculptors. One may well ask what possible political
harm could be done, for instance, by the Parthenon frieze,
a severely choreographed depiction of the sacred procession celebrating the goddess of the city of Athens, in
which human beings are shown in decorous beauty and
the gods, reverently depicted a little larger than men,
watch graciously from Olympus. The answer is that
Socrates is here attacking not the subject or style of any
art, but art itself as diverting the attention by a procession of images from those self-same unities of thought
whose contemplation keeps a community whole.
It is necessary to say that this radical proscription of
while N a-place,
its successful rival, embodies its
philosophy in an unphilosophical way (namely, as a fleshand-blood fiction).
The case must be put more strongly. Not only is the
city of Republic not a city of the imagination, but its very
building is framed by two massive and deep attacks on
all works of the imagination and on the imagination itself.
In Platonic dialogues where a point is made often
determines its interpretation, so let me give a rapid sketch
of the structure of the work, which is, in fact, rather
strictly symmetrical. There are ten books. In the first
of these are brought out the depths and the difficulties
of the controlling question: "What is justice and what
14
the imagination is to be taken in its context. Socrates
himself is, as I have mentioned, about to launch into the
telling of a magnificent myth, a huge and brilliant cosmic
image. The attack on the imagination is intended seri-
WINTER 1985
�ously enough within the intellectual exercise he and
Plato's brothers are engaged in: the thinking out of a city
which would realize a philosopher's understanding of the
human soul and which would therefore be safe for
philosophy. But it is not, I think, meant for practical
political implementation.
The censorship which is closer to possible political
practice is the one discussed earlier in the dialogue, at
the beginning of the building of the city, in connection
with the upbringing of the children. Socrates, first and
last, aims at the epic poetry of Homer-a bold and scan·
dalous attempt, since the Homeric poems were the great
primers of Greek education. What Socrates blames
Homer for is primarily the portrait of the gods to which
he has accustomed the Greeks: they are lustful, quarrel-
Plato thinks that it will stimulate and excite them and
lead to boisterousness followed by lassitude in the citizens.
Plato's Socrates deems the arts politically indigestible.
The second remarkable fact is that the problems
Socrates raises are very much our own. It is, for exam-
ple, a much debated problem of our time whether the
images children see affect their behavior and whether the
shows they watch work their feelings off or work them
up. Similarly some of us wonder what the social effects
of our popular modes of music and dancing really are:
How, to try a comical experiment of the imagination,
would our public life change if we made every seven-year·
old learn to dance the minuet? So the Socratic problems
are much alive even if his solutions are out of tune with
our society.
some, unstable, mendacious, and unjust-a fact, inciden-
Plato's Republic has been seen as a prototype of
tally, to delight and puzzle a post-Christian reader. Fur·
totalitarianism, for several reasons; because Socrates' intellectual exercise has been mistaken for a practical proposal, because Socrates' city is not a democracy (as if no
thermore, the Homeric heroes are indecently woebegone
and fearful of death; both gods and men are intemperate
in laughing and weeping. The tragedians are attacked
in addition for the very form of their poetry: its dramatic
format requires the actors to do all but turn themselves
into the person of the drama and so to lose their dignity
and selfhood in histrionics. All these productions are to
be banished from the city. Music too is to be purged of
all those modes which are not tonic but relax and slacken
the soul. What is left are tales of human excellence and
reverent hymns.
This precisely delineated call for a civic censorship
of the form and content of the arts may not seem to be
so radical as that subsequent attack on the imagination
itself which I have just summarized. Yet that is not really
the case, for what Socrates here criticizes about the arts
is what it is in their very nature to be and to do: they
absorb and inform the participant; they are concerned
with what is human-all-too-human even when imaging
the divinities; and above all, they burst the bounds of
tranquil dailiness in depicting what is extreme, ex-
cruciating, and passionate. The subdued decorum that
dominates utopias and that Socrates too recognizes as
a condition of civic tranquility is rarely .a cause of a theme
or a characteristic of art.
These arguments for political control of the arts are
above all remarkable in that they constitute a testimonial
to the knowledgeable seriousness with which Plato and
his Socrates take the arts (although they make little of
the artist himself). They share this attitude with their
fellow Greeks. For example, the public importance of
music, the power of its various modes to dispose the soul
and shape the schemata of the body, was recognized
throughout the Greek cities, where music and dance were
part of the city's life. Thus Aristotle ends his great book
on politics with a disquisition about the function of the
decent third possibility between totalitarianism and
democracy was thinkable), but- most weightily- just
because of those censorship provisions we are discussing.
Totalitarian states do, of course, have censorship of
the arts-and all sorts of other censorship Socrates never
proposes. I shall very briefly sketch the nature of the cen·
sorship practiced in the two chief totalitarian states of
our century to show how utterly different it is from the
classical case.
I mean, of course, Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union. The two cases differ in one important way: Nazi
censorship appears to have been devoid of articulable ra·
tional foundations, and appealed instead to misty but
emotion-loaded semi-ideas and watchwords, while Soviet
censorship is rigidly based on an ideological frame, shift·
ing only as the Central Committee of the Communist
Party declares changes in interpretation. The documents
of both are scoldingly rancorous and brutally threaten·
ing toward offending artists, although the Nazi literature
on censorship exceeds the Soviet documents in a vulgarity
that is scarcely communicable in English. The human
plane of either is simply incommensurable with Socrates'
gently ironic proposal to anoint and crown the poets and
politely speed them on their way to another city.
I should mention that the previous observation con·
cerning the inability of states to engender art is borne
out by the censorship literature itself: there are con·
tinuous small-voiced complaints that politically pure art
of real stature which is to replace the censored art has
failed to appear.
The explicit object of Nazi censorship was to purge
the arts of all elements not conducive to readiness for
sacrifice, obedience to Adolf Hitler, and the submersion
of the self in the totality, the State, the Race. For this
musical modes in citizen training. What is peculiar to
last purpose a new subject, called "race-style-science,
Plato, and where he differs from Aristotle, is his view
of the effect of very intense experiences on the soul. While
Aristotle supposes that attendance at a tragic performance
will work a purgation and transformation of the passions,
(Rassenstilkunde) was invented, and Nazi estheticians
debated whether the tango or the minor mode or chamber
music might be admitted as Germanic while proscribing atonal music for its rootless intellectualism and in·
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
15
�ternationally popular hits for their supra-national
cosmopolitanism. Effeminacy, decadence and the Jewish
spirit were to be rooted out in all the arts. Bookstores
were required to remove proscribed books on pain of being blacklisted. Of course the most notorious early act
of censorship was the government-supported book burning of 1933. As the books were consigned to the flames
a speaking chorus of brownshirted students would call
such lines as "For discipline and morality in Family and
State I give to the flame the writings of .. :• and supply
the name of the blacklisted authors, mostly novelists.
As for Soviet censorship, Lenin set the tone long
before the revolution by proclaiming that all literature
is party-literature, and that literature is not an individual
concern but belongs to the proletariat: "Down with nonpartisan literature, down with literary supermen." The
creation of art was to be organized, for art is, above all,
the organization of the emotions of persons, groups,
classes, nations. Stalin later summarized this view in a
politics. A totalitarian state is, or means to be, a different
whole than is a Greek city, whether it philosophical or
actual. The former is, so to speak, an embodied abstraction which attempts to pervade life totally from the top
down and absorbs rather than bonds its individual
elements; strictly speaking, its relations are not political
at all because they are that of an amalgam or a collective and not of persons. Its censorship tries to reinforce
this condition: the aim is not, as in the Socratic city, to
shape self-possessed citizens, but to meld a people into
a fervent mass.
The third point of difference lies in the contrasting
conceptions of the virtues that the arts are to be made
to instill. To cite just the Nazi list of affirmations as
revealed in the watchwords recurring incessantly in the
marching songs which were the most voluminous pro-
duct of the revised arts: loyalty, obedience, flag, flame,
race, blood, bullet, drum, submission and the love of
death. Compare to these the virtues of Socrates' citizens:
much quoted phrase to the effect that writers are the
engineers of the human soul. In 1920 Lenin sketched out
resolutions for Proletkult, the bureaucracy in charge of the
new proletarian culture: there are, he said, to be no new
and special ideas but the traditional culture is rather to
be appropriated by Marxist ideology. There are
manifestos stating that the working class has the leadership in literature; fellow travellers may be tolerated for
their expertise in technique, but all appearances of
courage stemming from a knowledge of what is truly to
be feared, temperance understood as a proper selfadjustment of the soul, justice interpreted as a knowledge
counter-revolutionary ideas are to be ruthlessly
concern with controlling and even excluding some arts
eradicated. Under Stalin followed attacks (which have,
incidentally, been lately revived) against formalism or
so-called abstract art, for example, in behalf of socialist
realism. Socialist realism demands that art always display
a proud and life-affirming optimism, while works with
for the sake of its own integrity. For these cities a decent
of one's proper part in the community, and wisdom to
be attained in the course of a long effort of learning.
The object of this comparison of obnoxious
totalitarian and benign Socratic censorship is to point
out what it seems to me we sometimes forget: that a cer-
tain kind of political community may have a defensible
censorship is conceivable, and Socrates initiates the
living people a dogmatic pseudo-myth of race or an
discussion of its rationale. A prime example of such a
debate in more modern times is the open letter, published
in 1758, whichJeanJacques Rousseau sent to d' Alembert
in response to his article in the Encyclopidie advising the
Republic of Geneva to establish a theatre. Rousseau wrote
as a citizen of this small republic, and his chief argument, which was directly influenced by Plato's Republic,
is that such an alien and sophisticated amusement will
undermine the simple and close communal life of the
no edifying content, which divorce art from socialist
truth, are declared undesirable.
Now let me point out the elements in which Socratic
censorship differs from totalitarian censorship.
First, whereas the totalitarian censorship enforces on
ideology of class, Socrates proposes his constraints on the
Genevans. Rousseau, like Socrates, recognized an ir-
poets as a philosophical exercise, a possibility to be considered on the basis of an ever-renewable inquiry into
reconcilable conflict between the arts and the political
community, a conflict perhaps less deep but correspond-
the conditions of a political community; the issue is,
ingly more extensive in ffiodern times when the drama
is no longer a great sacred public occasion but a mere
amusement. For it is just such a diversion which by its
agile worldliness, its artful excitations and its isolating
therefore, not this or that work or style, but the very
nature of art and its relation to communal life. The
Socratic attack on poetry is far more radical in thought
and far less disruptive in deed than totalitarian
censorship.
Second, there is a deep difference between a
totalitarian state and a political community in Socrates'
sense. In the former the dubious bond of race or class
if considered to underlie, precede and supercede the relations of individuals, while the very device on which
Socrates builds his city, namely that of a soul writ large,
displays his assumption that a city is ultimately shaped
and determined by the souls within it, and that the
political bond is one of individuals: "psychology" precedes
16
spectatorship may loosen the bonds of a small community.
What then about censorship of the arts in our own
political community,
in a national representative
democracy? It seems to me that it has no place whatsoever
with us. Indeed it is a dead, or at least a dormant, issue
(except with respect to pornography; and acknowledged
pornography, which is for the sali.e of sexual arousal, does
not come under my definition of art as a product of the
imagination which is not primarily an instrument of
anything). As its censoring role in the arts ought to be
nil, so the government's positive function can be only
WINTER 1985
�minimal. It can and should encourage the arts in general,
for example, by modest funding, but it can never rightly
make itself responsible for furthering a specifically communal, a truly political, art. In short, the proper attitude
American republic had been formed, and formed in conscious contrast to the classical model. In an ancient city
the primary bond is the political bond, and public life is
not only a means to human fulfillment but its very end.
of democratic governments to art seems to be friendly
tolerance or supportive indifference.
How can it be that an intense and critical relation
The modern model, however, interposes between private
and political life a social realm, "society;' a word of far
between politics and the arts is justifiable in classical com-
tween the individual and a determinate ideal whole,
more weight with us than politics. Political bonds are be-
munities while in our democracy a loose and tolerant
namely the laws, traditions and public spaces of the
relation is required? The answer seems to me to lie in
the change of meaning both terms, politics and art,
underwent in the century just before the founding of the
American Republic. Let me briefly outline the related
changes without attempting to articulate their deep common root.
First, the notion of Art. I have been using the word
as if its connotations for us were the same as in the
classical context- misleadingly, for just about the time
this country was founded there came to a climax a
development which transformed the meaning of the term.
Its original unpretentious sense was that of craft, of knowhow, of the ability to manage and produce objects of all
sorts. In the later eighteenth century the notion of a "pure
art work" came to the fore. Such a work of art was thought
to originate in the independent esthetic realm of the
radically free imagination, a world not bound to ordinary
given reality, a world of free play and autonomous illusion. Correlatively the craftsman was elevated into the
''Artist;' the godlike creator of this world, a genius, an
extraordinary being. And instead of the work of art as
a skillfully made object there arose ''Art" simply, namely,
that specially precious class of objects which is the product of the artist's absolutely self-determined imagination. Naturally this new artist claimed great authority
for himself and his imaginative realm. The German poet
Schiller, for instance, proposed that the problems of
politics could be solved if mankind were given an "esthetic
education;' so that human beings might live in the mode
of an artist, by the free play of the imagination (though
without themselves producing art). But although the artist's claim becomes one of universal human authority,
it is not hard to see that this new understanding makes
art essentially private. The final source and the final
arbiter not only for the form, but, above all, for the matter
of his products is the artist's own solitary imagination;
such works of private creation are not made to be put
in the service of the community and its divinities- the
artist would consider anathema any attempt at control
(as, for example, the ordinance of the Second Council
of Nicea proclaiming that the substance of religious scenes
is not left to the initiative of the craftsman but that the
craft alone belongs to the painter). So just as the
American republic was born, art became an essentially
personal enterprise, and the artistic mode came to be
privately over-valued and, with good cause, publicly
ignored.
In a parallel development that conception of a political
community which was to underlie the formation of the
community. Social relations, on the other hand, are between individual and individual; society as a whole is
an indeterminate abstraction. It is in terms of social rela-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tions that the bulk of our life, and especially our religious
life, takes place. Accordingly, the political sphere is not,
for most of us, the place of our fulfillment. It is rather
reduced to administration, that is to say, to essentially
negative governmental functions which are meant
precisely to protect the private and social realms from
disturbance and intrusion. A political sphere which is
so restricted and which is, by a special provision of the
constitution, devoid of any legitimate religious dimension, is not naturally going to give rise to a very exten-
sive or elevating art- though such a thing is not impossible: the major speeches of Abraham Lincoln constitute
a political art of real grandeur. But while we may always
hope for more such works, especially for a renewal of
great political rhetoric, we scarcely expect it. John Dewey,
for example, who is, after all, the proponent par excellence of a democratic fulfillment of life, wrote a book
called Art ar Experience, devoted to bringing art back from
the estheticism I described before into ordinary life. But
he never remotely considers the possibility of a public
art celebrating our free political institutions. For him,
art belongs altogether to the social realm.
Of course, the fact that our art is rarely political does
not mean that it cannot be thoroughly and characteristically democratic and American. Tocqueville, after whom
this forum is named, foresaw in 1835, with marvelous
acuity, what the sources of poetry in a democratic land
might be: how when faith in positive religion is shaken
the idea of providence and historical destiny assumes a
more imposing appearance; how when life is crowded
with petty business the march of the American people
across the continent subduing nature on the way is invested with special romance; how the democratic poet
concentrates more on passions and ideas than on con-
crete individual men, always looking to the inner soul- in
short how American poetry is suspended between grand
massive movements and the most private passions of men.
Is this not a near-perfect anticipation of Walt Whitman?
Yet ohe would not claim that Whitman played the role
in America that the tragedians, say, played in Athens.
He is the poet of America as a democracy rather than
as a republic; he celebrates a social rather than a political
fellowship.
To conclude. If the privatization of art and the
socialization of politics cut the ground from under a com-
17
�munal art, is there then no public place left for the arts?
Not so.
I have been speaking of politics in the largest sense,
meaning the national political community. But in this
country the actual business of life is largely carried on
in the cities, and it is in the cities that a civic life in the
fulfilling, antique, sense is to be found. The cities too
are the natural seats of the arts, because they are the communities in which the arts are cherished and in which
the artists flourish, and so it is the cities which have the
symphony halls, the art centers and the theatres.
Therefore, it is in the cities that the arts and civic life
still intersect, and here too those classical dilemmas concerning the divergences of the judgment of the citizen
and the imagination of the artist may on occasion come
to life.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle, Politics (second half, fourth century B.C.)
Basalla, George, "Science and the city before the nineteenth century;'
Transformation and Tmdition in the Sciences, Cambridge 1984
Denney, Reuel, The Astonished Muse, Popular Culture in America, Chicago
1957
Die Deutsche Literatur im Dritten Reich, ed. H. Denkler and K. Pruemm,
Stuttgart 1976
Dewey, John, Art as Experience (1934), New York 1980
Documents on Germany under Occupation 1945-54, ed. Beate Ruhm von
Oppen, Oxford 1955
18
Fehl, Philipp, "Gods and Men in the Parthenon Frieze;' The Parthenon,
New York 1974
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method, New York 1975
Holloway, Mark, Heavens on Earth, Utopian Communities in America
1680-1880, New York 1966
Hume, David, "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences;'
(mid-eighteenth century)
Jaspers, Karl, Man in the Modern Age (1931), New York 1957
Literatur und Dichtung im Dritten Reich, Documents, ed. Joseph Wulf,
Rowohlt 1966
Manuel, Frank E. and Fritzie P., Utopian Thought in the Western World,
Cambridge 1977
McMullen, Roy, Art, Ajfluence and Alienation, The Fine Arts Today, New
York 1969
More, Thomas, Utopia (1516), The Penguin edition, 1976, has an appendix on "More's Attitude to Communism"
Morris, William, News from Nowhere (1890)
Morrow, Glenn P., Plato's Cretan City, Princeton 1960
Musik im Dritten Reich, Documents, ed. Joseph Wulf, Rowohlt 1966
Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia, New York 1974
Plato, Critias, Laws, Republic (first half, fourth century B.C.)
Plato, 10talitarian or Democrat? ed. T. L. Thorson, Englewood Cliffs 1963
Rousseau, Jean:Jacques, Politics and the Arts, Letter toM. D:Alembert
on the Theatre,· trans. Allan Bloom, Glencoe 1960
Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man, New York 1977
Schiller, Friedrich, Concerning the Esthetic Education of Mankind, m a
Series of Letters (1795)
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, A Difmse of Poetry (1821)
Die Sowjetphilosophie, Wendigkeit und Bestimmtheit, Documents, ed.
Wilhelm Goerdt, Darmstadt 1967
Theories of Education in Early America, 1655-1819, ed. Wilson Smith,
Indianapolis 1973
Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America (1835)
Utopias and Utopian Thought, A Timely Appraisal, ed. Frank E. Manuel,
Boston 1967
Der Utopische Roman, ed. R. Villgradter and F. Krey, Darmstadt 1973
WINTER 1985
�Five From
The Old Testament
Jacob
This sequence is from a forthcoming
book of poems based on Old Testament figures. 'Gideon' has previously
appeared in Shirim, 'Aaron' in
Kansas Quarterly.
I crossed the river feeling for sink- holes
with a crooked staff and a blind man crying
"Thief1 Thief1" while my brother wept,
the beggar, hungry as a hunter.
He is coming to meet me.
The desert trembles, he is still too far away
for me to see his hands.
Angels camp at the Jabbok ford.
I have offered him everything I ownnothing I claim is mine by right,
All I keep is the blessing I stole.
J.
Kates, widely published as a poet, is currently writing a novel about the
civil rights movement. Kates lives in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
Who are you, dressed like my brother Esau,
straining in my smooth arms,
begging me to let you go?
for Peter
]. Kates
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
19
�Aaron
Samson
He has stones between his teeth.
Lisping, spluttering, stuttering,
the words of freedom fall out of his mouth
like broken nutshells, admonitions
and commandments like the cracked pits
of luscious fruit.
I dropped like an empty bucket
into her bed. Three times I tried,
three times failed the test;
I had not guessed my own riddle.
He can do anything with his arms,
he has only to lift thembut his fingers are too subtle,
rebellious, fluttering like his tongue,
afraid to touch what moves suddenly.
Who you are and why you come
to lead me in my traces like a mill- ox
mashing the dull chaff under my bare feet
I know, my boy,
He has held his staff over his head
conducting God's glory, opening
passage through the water, wells
in the desert; I have bent down
to pluck it writhing out of the dust.
I am not so stupid as you think.
Your hair will grow, your beard thicken
and you will find some comfort
in the arms of women.
From private gold I fashion public images,
talking all the time.
I do tricks to distract the multitudes
while he stumbles up the mountainside alone
and returns shimmering,
speechless.
J
20
A man who has never known sweetness
in his belly grows sick of strength,
of swinging a dry bone.
J
Kates
Kates
WINTER 1985
�Saul
Gideon
Once I towered over the best of my tribe.
When I walked out, even on trivial errands,
men who were thinking of kings
whispered my name.
While I was threshing wheat behind the winepress
and keeping secret, he said to me,
If I can strike fire from the rock
I will make a man of valor out of you.
·The force of my arm drove all enemies down.
Now I lift my left hand only with trouble,
the right drums like five fools on the table.
My sons are treacherous archers
who shoot deliberately to miss the target.
All this was done with words
like a stick against the flesh,
nothing but noises dashed against each other
to let the light shine through.
There is an empty seat, a gap in the company,
a missing tooth throbbing in my jaw.
Where is the young hero who should be here,
the lad who would swagger out against giants?
Have I withered to a mote in his eye
now that the oil is dried?
An old man can shit, can sleep, be pitied
So I went against the dumb thing of Midian
with ten men only like a small stand
of flaming trees, and we cast it down
into its silence.
We are a division of the god of number.
As the man is, so is strength
multiplied by the trumpet of his speech
and the silence of the fearful.
because he is harmless, a king of wandering asses.
An old man can fling a spear at a hole
and watch it quiver in the mud wall
J
Kates
but miss the music he needs
to lull him into the morning.
And also the song King David sang sh'ivering in the
arms of Abishag.
]. Kates
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
21
�James Joyce's Soul
Joseph Engelberg
piece of writing becomes a work of art when
it is rich in meaning, when it embodies level
upon level of understanding. As in an archaeological investigation a hierarchy of artifacts waits to be uncovered: the equivalent
of bits of doth and shards of pottery; jewelry and pots;
murals and statues; rooms and houses; streets and cities;
etc. Nabokm.t 1 enjoins us not to overlook in the archaeology of any literary masterpiece the beauty and
greatness which can reside at the lowest level: in the
details, the literary shards and bits. This is a wise admonition, but an unnecessary one for scholars of James
Joyce. Much of their scholarship justly celebrates Joyce's
magnificient and suggestive detail. There are, however,
also in his works higher levels which await contemplation. Indeed, at the level of joyce's entire opus there lies
a theme which overarches all his works. It is the subject
of this essay.
The story of any human life is the story of an awakening and of a falling asleep: an emergence out of unconsciousness into consciousness (paralleling the rise of
consciousness in biological evolution), followed by a descent into unconsciousness and extinction. The works of
James Joyce, followed chronologically, retrace this cosmic
scheme. 2 Against the panorama of a civilization Joyce
depicts the birth, travail, and decline of a soul. It is the
story of Stephen Dedalus' soul, but it may as well be the
story of Joyce's soul, or of the soul of our time.
A
Joseph Engelberg teaches Physiology and Biophysics at the Albert B. Chandler
Medical Center of the University of Kentucky.
22
The Soul
For millenia the word "soul," a word rich in connotation, was common in our civilization. It was in use as
much in common life as in the most refined works of
literature and religion. Then recently- suddenly- it
disappeared from our midst. Why did it leave? Had we
become so old and wise as to no longer need words from
our spiritual childhood? Had the word "soul" become
meaningless and superfluous like the word "protoplasm"
in biology, "phlogiston" in chemistry, and "humor" in
medicine? Had mankind begun to conceive of the human
being as a machine, lacking any meaning beyond that
of a bag of parts- hearts, kidneys, livers, lungs: its destiny
to rust out and end on a scrap heap?
What might be meant by the word "soul"? When we
remember someone we may recollect some characteristic
part of the body, perhaps the hands or face; some disposition of the body, such as the gait, gesture, or posture;
some aspect of the inner self, such as mind, intelligence,
emotion, superego, unconscious, character. But each of
these is but a fragment of one's being, and "soul" does
not refer to any one of them. "Soul" may be said to stand
for the undivided, unitary, integrative essence of a person. That is why we cannot specify where in the body
the soul resides, or what its mass and chemical composition are. Like any attribute of an entire systempopulation size, gross national product, entropy,
volume,- it cannot be localized within the system.
The "soul" represeJ?.tS a unity. Yet it -is not selfcontained. It is embedded in, and draws its life from
family, friends, and society; from those that have lived,
live now, and are yet to live; from history, tradition, and
cosmos. To these the soul is connected by a myriad of
bonds- the greater their number and variety, the greater
its vitality, vibrancy, solidity and extension.
WINTER 1985
�Should some of the bonds be cut the soul loses size
and strength, and when many bonds are severed, it
shrinks, becomes vestigial; the body remains, but consciousness recedes. The organism withdraws from existence and gravitates towards automatism, somnolence,
sleep, unconsciousness, extinction. The body may be the
first to fail, and, failing, carry the soul to its destruction.
But the destruction of the soul can precede that of the
body. When isolated from the influences which nurture
it and give it life, the soul atrophies, leaving behind an
abandoned body adrift towards a physical doom.
Stephen Dedalus' Soul
What the scientific instrument is to the student of
nature, the work of art is to the student of human existence. It makes visible what is invisible to the naked
eye. James Joyce's trilogy, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, is such an instrument,
such a work of art. It can be likened to the vast mirror
in a telescope, which collects and focuses a myriad of
subliminal light impulses, enabling the eye to penetrate
the reaches of the macrocosm. Joyce's trilogy brings
together the subliminal impulses of a civilization. It is
an instrument with which one can probe the microcosm:
the soul of modern (post-enlightenment) man.
The Portrait opens with the first stirrings of consciousness, the awakening of a soul from a deep,
cosmological sleep. This consciousness unfolds; it
culminates in the person of Stephen Dedalus. In scenes
of Stephen's childhood in the Portrait, the word "soul" can
scarcely be found. It is in descriptions of his adolescent
years that it makes a frequent appearance. 3 Whenever
the adolescent Stephen falls into an introspective mood,
the word "soul" is likely to appear in his musings.
Where was his boyhood now? Where was the soul that
had hung back from her destiny, to brood alone upon
the shame of her wounds and in her house of squalor
and subterfuge to queen it in faded cerements and in
wreaths that withered at the touch? 4
before him, that the more scrupulously he tries to satisfy
the demands of his faith, the more he sins. He is disillusioned; he falls; he breaks with his religion. It is the first
of a series of sunderings from the formative influences
of his life. Thereafter the word "soul" appears less and
less frequently in the text.
The story of the unfolding of Stephen's consciousness
is one of anguish and bitterness. It portrays his relentless
struggle against the mass of social, moral, and intellectual traditions which limit his existence. He feels trapped in a tangle of family and friends, the Dublin social
order, Jesuit education, the Roman Church, Irish history
and nationalism, bourgeois values, heroic ideals, British
political and cultural ascendancy.
From early childhood on Stephen finds himself entangled in this thicket of disparate and conflicting influences thrust upon him by society. He strives with the
ardor of genius, and in the light of a gifted imagination,
to reconcile them. He fails. Later, at the height of perplexity and despair, he is graced at the seashore by a revelation which begins to lead him out of the mist of questions, conflicts, and introspective confusion in which he
had been enveloped since childhood• It is a liberating
vision yielding him the understanding that reconciliation is impossible, that incommensurables cannot be
reconciled, that there is a higher sphere to which he must
rise. What he cannot reconcile he will abandon. One by
one he cuts the bonds which tie him to society, country,
religion, tradition, friends, family. In a release of emotions long dammed he feels his being affirmed; in the
agitation of a newly-found freedom he sets out to recreate
the world. The Portrait ends on a heroic note.
"He would create proudly out of the freedom and power
of his soul ... a living thing, new soaring and beautiful,
impalpable, imperishable ... To live, to err, to fall, to
triumph, to recreate lifE: out oflife! ... Welcome, 0 life!
I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of
experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. 6
Somnolence
"Soul" appears some 170 times in the Portrait. Where
it appears it represents some emotion-laden, deep, inward experience.
Her image had passed into his soul forever and no word
had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had
called him, and his soul had leaped at the call. 5
The use of the word reaches a crescendo in the
descriptions of a series of sermons on salvation, sin, and
hellfire preached by a priest in school at Eastertime. The
sermons, and the ambience of the season, serve to raise
Stephen to the level of religious exaltation. He enters
upon a period of piety, but finds, as did Saul of Tarsus
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
At the conclusion of the Portrait, as we have seen,
Stephen is about to go forth to triumphantly forge the
conscience of his race. Joyce's next work, Ulysses, takes
up the story two years hence. It centers on a trinity of
persons: Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly
Bloom. The Portrait had led us to expect to find the hammerblows of heroic creation. This expectation is
unfulfilled. Ulysses opens on an early morning with a feeble, drowsy Stephen in his temporary domicile, the
Martello tower at Dalkey near Dublin.'
Stephen Dedalus, displeased and sleepy, leaned his arms
on the top of the staircase ... B
23
�Later that morning he is at Mr. Deasy's school, where
he languidly and dreamily performs the functions of an
assistant teacher, a job which he is about to abandon.
In the afternoon he defends an abstruse doctrine in the
National Library, and in the evening he carouses with
medical students in a hospital. Midnight finds him in
a brothel, drunk and hallucinating. Later, as the night
draws to a close, bucked up by a cup of coffee and a stale
roll, tired but sober after a long walk through the deserted
Dublin streets and a visit to an acquaintance's house, he
seeks a place to sleep.
Ulysses appears to gravitate towards sleep. As it draws
to a close, it is not Stephen alone who seeks rest: all the
major characters are preparing their entrance into the
world of dreams. The last chapters portray Stephen's
journey towards sleep, the ruminations of Leopold Bloom
as he prepares for bed, and the stream-of-consciousness
of Bloom's wife Molly, who, in bed, in a state suspended
between wakefulness and sleep, reminisces upon the
events of her life and the day just past. It is the end of
a long, wearying day, and one would not attach great
significance to all this turning to sleep were it not for
the fact that Joyce's next work, Finnegans Wake, to which
he devoted eighteen of the last twenty years of his life,
is set entirely in the world of sleep, dreams, and phantasmagoric language.
In all this, far from the smithy in which an uncreated
conscience is to be forged, it is a drowsy, listless, passive,
vulnerable, defenseless, diffident, defeated Stephen we
find- a Stephen unequal to the onslaught of life; a
Stephen in retreat, sunk into himself, detached from those
he encounters, acted upon by circumstances but incapable
of acting.
The Fading of Consciousness
Joyce died January 13, 1941, some 24 months after
the publication of Finnegans Wake. In his works he
systematically traced the rise of a human soul to the very
heights of consciousness, and then its subsequent descent into torpor and sleep. Had Joyce lived to write
another work, what might have been the next step in this
soul's journey? Might the oblivion of sleep been succeeded
by the oblivion of death, leaving behind a universe devoid
of consciousness-as it eXisted before humankind made
its appearance on earth? It is said that Joyce was planning another work which was to have as its setting the
Sea. 9 Had this work been completed, Joyce's opus would
have retraced on the scale of a humble city, Dublin, the
cosmic drama of the birth and rise of consciousness, and
its decline into unconsciousness- the Portrait being the
story of the coming to life of a human soul; Ulysses, a
journey towards sleep; Finnegans Wake, the world of sleep;
Joyce's projected last work, unconscious nature. The goal
of life, according to Freud, is death ( cf. Beyond the Pleasure
24
Principle). Joyce's imagination appears to have gravitated
towards unconsciousness, human extinction.
Stephen Dedalus could not reconcile with the realities
of his time and place, his idealized visions of religion,
love, family, and society. Failing in this reconciliation he
chose to break his connections with them. For them he
would substitute the integrity of his self and soul, and
build upon this foundation. Liberated from the smothering influences of his paralyzed homeland and people, and
energized by an abundant spirit, he would build a new
reality.
Ironically, as long as he had been a part of this land
and its people, his soul had burned with an ardent flame.
After he cut himself loose, paralysis and torpor descended
upon his consciousness. This is anticipated in the Portrait
in words of a prophetic nature:
The snares of the world were its ways of sin. He would
fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in
an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he
felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some
instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still
unfallen but about to fall.lO
To sin is to break up that which needs be whole.
The passage brings to mind the powerful ending of
"The Dead;' a story in Dub liners, of the collapse of a soul
under the illusions of a lifetime and the events of an
even1ng:
His soul had approached that region where dwell the
vast hosts of the sea . ... His soul swooned slowly as he
heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and
faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon
all the living and all the dead. 11
The protagonist of this story is said to be at least in part
the young Joyce's conception of what he might have
become in middle age had he remained in Dublin and
become a conventional success there. 1 2 The story begins
with an energetic, confident Gabriel Conroy as he embarks, with pleasurable anticipation upon an evening of
festivity, self-exaltation, and amorous adventure. He is
a teacher at an Irish college (i.e., high school), financially
secure, socially established; a reviewer of books for a
prominent newspaper; a possessor of a fine wife, home,
and children; a man of authority and social standing.
But scarcely has he arrived at the house of his aunts for
their traditional Christmas party than he suffers a series
of psychic blows. These blows undermine his sense of existence, of his understanding of who he is, of who his
wife is, and of what life expects of him. As the evening
comes to a close, sitting at the window of an· unlit hotel
room, his wife fitfully asleep beside him, he feels his identity fading: he swoons as his soul tumbles towards the
cold, snow-covered, eternal land of the dead. It is another
depiction of the extinguishing, through isolation, of
consciousness.
Still another example is found in ''A Painful Case;'
WINTER 1985
�a story in Dubliners, written by Joyce in his early twenties, where he speculates as to what might become of
him by middle age were he to continue to live in a
society which he despises while systematically and scrupulously isolating himself from its influences. 13 The story
relates the progressive involvement of a Mr. Duffy with
a married woman, and his final scornful rejection of her
passion. Over a lonely dinner, one evening, he learns that
she has died. The news comes to him in an article describ-
ing the inquest into her death. He leaves his dinner half
eaten. As he walks out into the cheerless cold of a gloomy
evening, he meditates upon his own nature:
His life would be lonely too until he, too, died, ceased
to exist, became a memory- if anyone remembered him .
. . . He felt his moral nature falling to pieces . ... No
one wanted him; he was outcast from life's feast. He
turned his eyes to the grey gleaming river winding along
towards Dublin . ... He could hear .nothing: the night
was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent.
He felt he was alone. 14
Mr. Duffy had labored to be free. Fate had granted his
wish. He was alone.
Whose soul is departing?
Have we been speaking of James Joyce, or only of
Stephen Dedalus, an object of his creation? Some consider Stephen to be Joyce:
We ought to know a lot about Joyce, seeing that he was
at great pains to tell us all he could. He put himself into
all his books. He is the unnamed boy in Dubliners,
Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
and Ulysses, Richard in Exiles, and Shem the Penman
in Finnegans Wake, and, if Joyce painted them himself,
who shall say that any of them is a bad likeness?
(Frank Budgen) 15
Others consider Stephen to be Joyce's creation:
... my brother was not the weak, shrinking, infant who
figures in A Portrait of the Artist. He was drawn, it is true,
very largely upon his own life and his own experience,
... But A Portrait of the Artist is not an autobiography;
it is an artistic creation.
(Stanislaus Joyce)••
No matter: the works of a literary artist inevitably
reveal to us something about himself and about the times
in which he lives. Joyce bridges the end of the previous
century, and the beginning of the present one. It was a
moment when, everywhere, young, sensitive, gifted intellectuals awakened to find, on the one hand, stagnant
social realities, nightmarish histories, and ancient,
hypocritical religions; and, on the other, the promise of
a liberated, secure, enlightened future based upon imagination, science, and reason. They thirsted for release,
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
for a fresh start, for escape from the smothering ambience
of tawdry traditions. They felt themselves to be living
at the very interface of a nightmarish past, and an iridescent future. They vowed to forget the past, to create
a new future, a future based upon freedom, honesty,
beauty, spirit, and justice. Like Stephen, they dreamed
of severing their bonds to existing history, tradition,
religion, culture, and society. In the end they found, as
he did, in place of liberation, in place of a new, pure,
and exalted life, that an unkind fate had granted themsleep, that is to say, a lower form of consciousness. 17
Ours is an age of sleep. The seemingly feverish activity around us is that of a troubled dream. There is
a great striving for sleep on earth and an eternal rest in
the world to come. There is a yearning for diversion,
anesthesia, alcohol, narcotic~, sleeping pills, and tranquilizers; for mental disciplines which would take us out
of this world and never bring us back; for sharing the
rest of the dead while yet alive. Genius appears to be falling asleep, consciousness to be departing. Its departure
is reminiscent of the mystical doctrine concerning the
Shechinah, the divine presence of God on earth. 18 When
humankind feels that everything can be under its complete control, when it relies only upon itself and thinks
that it does not need anything higher, the Shechinah turns
away, and departs, as if to say "You do not need me now.
I will go away and come back some other time:'
The Knight of Faith
Joyce reveals to us in his works the travails of Stephen's
soul, of his own soul, of his age's soul. To these revelations, he joins in Ulysses the legend of Leopold Bloom,
the narrative center around which other characters trace
their orbits. Bloom is seemingly a scandal and a stumbling block: a mediocre, vulgar, uncultured, unassuming,
undistinguished, canvasser of advertisements- hardly the
counterpart of the Ulysses of Homer's Odyssey. Yet joyce
saw Bloom as an embodiment of an ideal type: the good
man, the complete man. 19 In what sense can Bloom be
taken to be a good man, a complete man?
We have spoken of the "soul" as a core of personal
being measured by its capacity to integrate the "I" with
the "other!' Bloom, indeed, has a rich soul. He is luxuriously connected to the world around him, the world
and cosmos of Dublin and its people. In this he contrasts
with other characters in Ulysses. These, leading pinched
lives, are locked within themselves amidst clouds of personal obsession. They perceive the world which lies outside themselves to be contorted and an intrusion upon
their inner being. Not so Bloom whose mind and vision
are clear, whose heart is responsive to those around him,
who exults in the world. As we follow him on his
peregrinations, we become aware of the myriad connections which bind him with an inexhaustible sympathy
to the city and its inhabitants. 2 Food being a prerequisite
°
25
�for existence, he feeds the hungry: in the morning his
cat and wife; later the seagulls over the Liffey, the dogs
in Nighttown; and, in the early hours of the next morning, a debilitated Stephen. He consoles the orphans and
the widows: at Glasnevin Cemetery he leaves for the
family of a deceased acquaintance an offering considered
generous for a man of his means, and shows concern for
their receiving the life insurance. It is not the body alone,
however, which must be fed, but also the soul. Wherever
he goes he enters with sympathy into the lives of those
he meets: Stephen's sister, underfed and in a tattered
dress; Stephen wandering about the vast reaches of his
own intellect; Mrs. Breen shepherding a deranged husband; the elderly, deaf waiter at the Ormond Cafe;
romantic, lame, Gerty MacDowell at Sandymount shore;
Mrs. Purefoy in prolonged labor at the Lying-in Hospital
on Holies Street.
If Bloom is prodigal in entering such relationships
it is not because he is spared affiictions of his own: there
is his father's suicide, and the death of his only son; the
separation from his remaining child, a daughter, who
lives in a distant city; his being an outsider in the Dublin
scene; his lack of commercial success and social status.
Yet, in spite of such adversities and losses, there is
no hint, as he touches upon the experiences offered him
by this Dublin day, that he longs for a release from life,
that he wishes to escape its exigencies through sleep or
death.
In this Bloom recalls to us the "Knight of Faith;' the
Abraham-like figure in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling
who lives for the infinite yet is firmly rooted in the daily
round of a finite world. 21 What is remarkable about this
"knight" is the extraordinary presence he brings to bear
upon the everyday events and encounters of his life. Yet
he seems commonplace to others, his special nature being
unperceived by those around him. Bloom is such a
knight. He is a life-force which vivifies the narrative of
Ulysses and invests its earthbound finiteness with infinite
longings.
26
Life, Joyce seems to tell us, lies with the "Knight of
Faith" solidly rooted in existence; somnolence, sleep and
death follow the cutting loose of the soul from its
moonngs.
NOTES
1. V. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, Ed. John Updike, New York
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, p. 373.
2. Cf. julian Huxley in Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn to the Universe.
Teilhard views each coming to life of a human being as a cosmic
event: with the arrival of humankind the universe became conscious of itself.
3. The implicit suggestion that the "soul" is something acquired during adolescence is reminiscent of the Talmudic dictum that the
child is born with an "evil inclination;' and that the "good inclination" begins to develop only at puberty (cf. (18), p. 89).
4. J. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York: Viking
Press, 1964, p. 171.
5. Portrait, p. 172.
6. Portrait, p. 170, 172, 252.
7. Cf. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, New York: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1928.
8. ]. Joyce, Ulysses, New York: Modern Library, 1961, p.3
9. L. Gillet, Clayhookfor jamesjqyce, trans. G. Markow-Totcvy, London and New York, 1958, p. 119. Cited by S. L. Goldberg,Jqyce,
Abeland.Schumann: New York, 1972, p. 114.
10. Portrait, p. 162
11. ]. Joyce, Duhiiners, New York: Modern Library, 1954, p. 288.
12. C. H. Peake,JamesJqyce: The Citizen and the Arlist, Stanford, Calif:
Stanford University Press, 1977, p. 343.
13. Cf. S. L. Goldberg, Jqyce, New York: Capricorn, 1972, p. 40.
14. Duhliners, p. 145-147.
15. F. Budgcn, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1972, p. 18, 118.
16. S. Joyce, My Brother's Keeper, New York: Viking Press, 1969, p. 17.
17. Cf. S. Zweig, Die Well von Gestern, Stockholm: Bermann-Fischcr
Verlag AB, 1944.
18. A Cohen, Ever)'man:r 'lidmud, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1979,
p. 42.
.
19. Budgen, p. :H:1 loc cil.
20. Peake, p. :124<129 lot: . .:it.
21. A. Goldman, Tht Joyce Paradox, Evanston, I11.: NmLhwestern
Uniw1·si!y Pres:-;, 1966, p. 76.
WINTER 1985
�Watching Plains Daybreak
for Erick Hawkins
Antelope, buffalo, hawk.
Avatars of Eden,
these gentle, millenia! beasts
dance on dawn-bleached grass
ceremony and enigma.
Their masks do not simply create an aesthetic distance,
inviting us to rest in contemplation; they are spurs
to a certain psychic motion.
Habit blinds us. These masks and stylized movements,
erasing the veil of familiarity in a revelation
of essence, restore to us the instrument of wonder,
the dishabituated eye.
Love moves between the two poles of unity and separation;
this distance is the place of wonder.
This dance thus works its conversion; quietly coerced to wonder,
we are awakened, one and new,
into the revealed Peaceable Kingdom, and drawn awake
to the things of this world in love.
Open your eyes!
Nothing has happened bifore!
This is the first daybreak ever.
Richard Freis
Richard Freis, an alumnus of St. John's, Annapolis, has published poems in
Poetry, The Southern &view and other magazines. President of the First and
Vice-president of the Second USA International Ballet Competitions, he is
a longstanding admirer of choreographer Erick Hawkins.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
27
�Self-Portraits
Elliott Zuckerman
started painting again in the fall of 1977, after
not having done more than an occasional picture
in twenty years. As a young man I had never
painted portraits or self-portraits, but since I
started again faces have been the only subjects
that interest me. When painting other people I enjoy the
effort to get a resemblance; but when I succeed, the
delight in the captured look seems to end my interest
in finishing the picture.
Only in a few of the earlier self-portraits have I been
primarily interested in resemblance. Once a new picture
is begun, the person on the canvas seems to me to be
someone else, someone not-quite-me, usually looking at
me, who may or may not reflect an aspect of my feelings, permanent or transient, about myself. I do not
reproach myself with excessive self-infatuation, because
it is not I who matters but the fellow in the picture.
There are now more than seventy self-portraits.
Those reproduced here were painted in oils and are all
of the same dimensions: 20 X 24 inches.
I
EDITOR'S NOTE:
It is at my urging that Mr. Zuckerman has
permitted these self-portraits to be reproduced
here, even though we could not afford to present them in color. I have asked him to write
a brief preface.
Elliott Zuckerman is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. His lecture,
Beyond the First Hundred Years: Some Remarks on the Si"gnificance of Tristan, appeared
in the Winter '84 issue of the Review·
28
WINTER 1985
�Self-Portrait number 8
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
29
�Self-Portrait number 35
30
WINTER 1985
�Self-Portrait number 46
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
31
�Self-Portrait number 31
Self-Portrait number 33
Self-Portrait number 48
Self-Portrait number 26
32
WINTER 1985
�Self-Portrait number 51
Self-Portrait number 11
Self-Portrait number 29
Self-Portrait number 4 7
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
33
�Self-Portraii number 24
Self-Portrait number 16
Self-Portrait number 18
Self-Portrait number 28
34
WINTER 1985
�Self-Portrait number 39
Self-Portrait number 41
Self-Portrait number 50
Self-Portrait number 10
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
35
�The Opera Singer as Interpreter:
A Conversation with Sherrill Milnes
Susan Fain
R
ecently I had the opportunity to speak with
Sherrill Milnes, leading baritone with the
Metropolitan Opera. Our talk centered
around the peculiar position of the opera
singer, standing between composer and audience. For twenty years Milnes has performed on the
stages of all the world's major opera houses. Most often
seen in the popular Italian repertoire, he has also received
much critical acclaim for performances of Thomas'
Hamlet and Saint.Saens' Henry VIII. Of towering height,
strongly sculptured facial features, and a unique and
powerful vocal timbre, Milnes dominates a stage
whenever he appears. In talking with him about his
thoughts on opera, one is first struck by the specificity
of his insight. The statements he makes are usually accompanied by examples from a particular work, and often
even a specific passage is sung in support of the thought.
· Opera, to Milnes, is a much bigger-than-life medium.
It has a power to reach out to an audience in a way that
cannot be ignored.
The music takes longer to develop. In a play you say,
"I love you~ In an opera that's a ten minute scene. There's
no such thing as, "I love you;' and "I love you too;' and
then you go on, which is the norm in a play. However
long it would take in a play, in an opera there would
be pages and pages of music, with one emotion going
for that duration of time. The music is like a two-byfour over our heads which is undeniable in its power.
You can't ignore it. To take a simple example, I suppose
you could go to a play being tired or angry at something
else in your life and really not enjoy it at all. And the
play would not demand your attention. The opera would.
In general, the music in opera, opera music (symphony
Susan Fain is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis.
36
really because it is the orchestra there that is really compelling; a piano wouldn't be as much so though still the
music would be more compelling than the spoken word)
will just take your attention. You could hardly sit there
and ignore it. It makes all of the emotions stronger, bigger, longer-lasting.
For Milnes, opera characters are thus simpler than
characters in a play, yet the presence of the music makes
them also more powerful. One cannot layer an operatic
character with multiple levels of meaning. "You can be
Sherrill, being I ago, pretending maybe one other thing.
But that's about as far as you can go in duplicity or triplicity of meaning!' More complexity simply confuses the
audience and there is no opportunity in an opera for a
long soliloquy of explanation. The Franco Zeffirelli production of Otello at the Met was a case in point.
Franco had a very definite idea about !ago; that he is
almost controlled, or consumed by ·some evil force that
is inside him, and over which he has only limited power.
Somewhat like an exorcist kind of thing, but Franco
didn't say it that way. When Iago says the "Credd:....!'I
believe in a cruel God who created me in his own image, out of the original slime, and after death there is
nothing;- Franco imagined that this is the first time that
Iago has ever said this; that it is this spirit that is saying
it, and that in fact, he is almost shocked at the words
that are coming out of his mouth, over which he has no
control. So that at the end of the "Credo;' Iago doesn't
laugh, but rather emits a horrified scream: "E vecchia
fola il Ciel. (Oh my God, what have I said?) AH!" And
then I cover my head with my cloak.
When you laugh at the end of the "Credd:_as is
traditionally done- then you have to think of the aria
as if it is the hundred and fiftieth time I ago has thought
this. There's a big difference in the way you do the aria
if you consider that he's never said these words before,
and that he's listening to some other voice speaking from
WINTER 1985
�within. And that scares him. But I also found that audiences, however, didn't always understand that. And it
makes the end of the third act (where Otello has swooned
and Iago stands over him proclaiming "Ecco illeone . . :')
a problem if you have rendered the ~~credd' in this
manner.
Instead of the traditional kicking of Otello, or putting my foot on his chest, Franco had me start to choke
the unconsCious Otello; to start to kill him, which is also
very different. Even though Iago says, "Chi puo vietar
che questa fronte prema col mio tallone?" Franco had
me start to choke him instead. Then at some point in
choking him, all of a sudden he realizes what he is doing. He is killing, he is choking Otello, and he realizes,
"This is my leader?' In a way, Iago chickens out. He
always talks about being the number one, but in fact
he doesn't really want to be the number one. He wants
a leader next to him. It's kind of a hate and love relationship. In the hate part he's strangling him, and then
he realizes, "Oh my God! What am I doing? I want
Otello to be there. I don'( want to be the number one:'
He wants to be the number one of the number one, but
he doesn't want to replace his boss, really. So he backs
off from choking Otello and sort of cringes away.
All of those things had a certain curve and validity,
but people didn't understand it. Franco was critical of
there being too many layers, and yet he had this Iago
very layered. As I recall the original performances, I and
the concept were sort of clobbered. They didn't get it
at all. Or else they got it- though nothing they wrote
indicated they did -and didn't like it. It was very untraditional. There are certain things that people want
to see. So now, even in that production, I do the traditional laugh.
For Milnes there is little doubt about the rightness
of yielding to the audience on these kinds of matters.
Because he sees his purpose as communicating a
character to the audience, rather than educating them
about the possible ways to think about a character, he
is sensitive to the audience's understanding. If the concept of the opera, for whatever reason, fails to effect that
commun.ication, then the singer has not achieved his pur-
pose. Milnes then related the story of Nicholai Gedda
and the "Flower Song" from Bizet's Carmen.
"Bizet wrote a very difficult, but very beautiful dimi-.
r;uendo f~r the final B flat of the 'Flower Song; but traditiOnally, singers unable to execute the diminuendo have
sung it loud and to great applause [Milnes then
demonstrates the "Carmen, je t'aime" in booming voice].
Gedda was able to diminuendo that B flat gorgeously,
almost as no other smger could, but the applause was
mtmmal. The question might be asked, why lower
yourself to accommodate the taste of the masses?" For
Milnes, and for Gedda, there is no question about the
answer. Gedda subsequently sang the ending loudly and
everyone raved. Why is this not merely pandering to applause? As Milnes put it, "If you're reaching out and turnmg on the audience, that's part of what it's all about. The
music is there to move the audience. It was written to
that end. Part of the performer's responsibility and obligaTHE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
tion to the composer is to elicit that very response, as
long as the means used are valid."
This led us into a discussion of whether or not operas
should be performed come scritto (as written, i.e., exactly
as the score indicates) or whether there is room for interpolation and transposition.
Ordinarily I would only interpolate high notes if I think
they are supported by the drama. Various conductors
around the world-especially Muti in this day-want
only come scritto; never mind even the understood
tra':lspositions like that in La Traviata [which Milnes explamed and demonstrated]. For example, Muti has a
recording of Leoncavallds I Pagliacci where the Prologue
is performed just as written: "Pari di voi spiriamo l'aere!
Incominciate!" so that the voice goes down at the end
of the phrase instead of up. I think that the come scritto
in this instance is foolish. Someone might say, "Leoncavallo didn't write that. Verdi didn't write that" and so
forth, as if to say that we know for sure that what is on
the printed page is the only one that the composer liked.
Lots of cadenzas and other stylistic things were
understood and expected to be done. Certainly in the
bel canto period you had to do that. Sometimes the com-·
pos~r would just put a corona and you were supposed
to smg measures and measures of improvised music.
Various people showing off; that was the idea. Less valid
perhaps in Verdi's time, but I can't believe for a minute
that interpolations were not expected. These composers
were ve~y prac~ical guys, and often they were writing
for particular smgers who they knew would be singing
the part for the first short span of the opera's life. If those
singers didn't have great A flats, of course they weren't
going to write a high A flat in there. That's one factor
to consider.
There is an interpolated high A flat in the "Pieta"
in Act IV of Verdi's Macbeth: "Pieta, rispetto, amore." It's
a little angular to do it. It makes a double dominant
chord. You have two dominants before you go to the
tonic. That's a little angular musically. But Macbeth is
pouring out his heart at that point. "Is my only epitaph
to be a curse?" All of this is inside Macbeth and he is
wailing his soul at that moment. In that context, to take
an extra high note to accentuate the pain of his soul
seems perfectly appropriate. Macbeth is looking back
over his life and thinking, "I did all these things, but all
I ever wanted was pity, respect, and love:'
Milnes than talked about what he refers to as the
"craft" of singing: the limitations imposed by costume
staging, and the singer's own body. How does Do~
Giovanni, or Simon Boccanegra, or Scarpia move about
the stage? The desired answer is provided by the music
and the drama, but to execute that movement requires
the "mechanics" of singing.
~n the case of Simon Boccanegra [who is a young man
m the Prologue and twenty-five years older in Act I] the
problem is how do you move _as a young man? How do
you go from the younger to the older? Those are
mechanics. You can't just think yourself younger and
thereby become younger. You have to be able to make
37
�younger gestures. I have never found that a psychological
concept like younger or older can be immediately
translated into a physical reality just by thinking it. How
do you move older? Thinking older? What is thatthinking older? How do you think older? You have to know
what muscles to relax. You have to learn how to sit down
tired; which muscles aren't as elastic. Gestures have to
slow down. I use a cane as Father Germont [in La
Traviata] because it slows me down and stops muscular
gestures. No one on the operatic stage nowadays is so
old as to be able to portray old men simply by reason
of being old. The operatic stage is energetic in its nature.
But you have to slow certain things down. Simone, in
the Prologue, has to be more energetic and evidence
more off-the-top-of-the-head kinds of gestures than the
older Simone. And then you're poisoned and you're
slowly dying. How do you do that? There's still muscle
in the music. You have to use the curves of the music.
You have to get your energy up, say a big important
phrase, and then be weak again'. You try to portray the
death with a certain amount of physiological correctness
by using the curves of the music.
Movements are also determined to a large degree
by the clothes you are Wearing. You have to move in a
certain way because the costume demands it. Therefore,
we as singers have to learn artificially how to move in
the appropriate way since we no longer wear clothes like
that. When you get up out of a chair you cannot push
yourself up and wiggle your shoulders. That's very inelegant. As nobility you had to move smoothly. The older
operatic -characters can afford to flop into chairs and
struggle to get up from them. Simone does so only when
he is dying since he's still a vital man at forty-five.
Characters are often portrayed differently in different
productions when they are wearing different costumes.
Milnes spoke of some of the differences between a traditional Scarpia [in Tosca] and the concept ofScarpia [and
the opera] that he encountered with German director
Gotz Friedrich.
Operatic characters often show different faces in different
scenes and sometimes I'm not so sure that there is a connection. Scarpia is definitely one man in the church [in
Act 1]. That's his external, public face with the things
he says to Tasca assumed to be private, even though there
is the crowd coming in for the mass. The operatic
assumption is that they're not paying attention or hearing what's going on although I do, as Scarpia, from time
to time check to see if anyone's watching us, because I
think he should. I don't. think that the character should
assume that no one is looking, even though you know
that they're not staged that way, because it's not supposed
to be staging from the character's point of view. But that's
his external face.
In a certain way, what he does in the first act doesn't
so much determine what he is going to do in the privacy
of his own living room [in Act II], although his sensuousness is basically the same. Various Scarpias would
have to manifest that sensuality differently. If a singer
is short and heavy and paunchy he would have to be very
careful with the way he evidences his desire for Tasca.
In fact, it's even determined somewhat by costume. In
38
the GOtz Friedrich production the black, stark kind of
costume stayed for both the first and second acts. The
second act opens and Scarpia is there, with his fingers
tapping on the table, just staring into space. The curtain opens and he's just staring. He's not eating his food
as is traditionally done. He's staring into space and
thinking to himself, "I've got to get Angelotti; What am
I going to do? Well, Tasca may· be my best falcon;' and
so he speaks aloud his first line, "Tasca e un huon falco?'
The concept of the whole opera was that Scarpia himself
was under time pressure. If he didn't get Angelotti back
within a certain time, a day or a couple of days maybe,
his own head could roll; someone is looking over his
shoulder. Of course, none of this is in the opera but it
also makes perfect sense. So Scarpia is thinking to .
himself, "I gotta get him. I gotta get him. I just missed
him by two minutes in the church," and meanwhile there
is this sense of time ticking away. Maybe he's even
perspiring. He's worried. Internally he's worried. That's
a terrific concept. And you're just staring into space and
thinking, "How am I going to get him? Tasca e un huon
falco. I'm gonna use her. And if I do this and this and
this maybe I'll get Mario and Angelotti both?'
In the Met production, however, the costume in the
second act, very unlike the first act, is French Revolution foppish. Also correct as the style of the time. But
the false elegance of the costume negates somewhat that
sense that time is ticking away; that very intense kind
of portrayal. So I started thinking that maybe the intense number wasn't right with the look of the
costume- that false elegant, almost foppish kind of thing
with vest, long coat and all that. So I went back to the
also valid, more traditional, eating food. With that, instead of the driven thoughts of the Friedrich concept,
Scarpia is just thinking calmly, 'Well, Tasca is probably
my best falcon," as he's eating his food and drinking some
wme.
This concept [with Scarpia calmly eating] sets up
something that I do later in the second act: throwing
the wine in Spoletta's face. 'It's a good bit but the Spoletta
has to say it's all right. I usually ask. The actual act of
doing it is dramatically powerful because people aren't
expecting it. If Scarpia takes a bite or two of the banana,
a couple of sips of wine right away, and then goes into,
"Tasca e un huon falco;' then when he goes back to do
the throwing of the wine, it's much more set up than
if he were only to take it into his hand right before he's
going to throw it in Spoletta's face. Then it looks a little
bit like you're picking it up because the stage directions
say so. Also there's a practical consideration. You drink
it down so that there is only about a half an inch of wine
and you don't have liquid all over the stage. If you threw
a whole glass of wine the Spoletta would be drenched.
&arpia is a very special part. In a way like Iago, there
are many ways to do it. I don't mean many ways from
A to Z. There are not a lot of totally different concepts
in terms of the whole arch of it. But there are a lot of
ways to go from A to B and from B to C -the little curves
all along the major curve of a character. Iago the same
way.
Once the vocal line is secure and the technical aspects
of a part are in place, is it necessary for the singer to
understand his character as a human being? For Sher-
WINTER 1985
�rill Milnes, the answer is often "yes!' At the time of our
conversation, Milnes was preparing to sing the title role
in Verdi's Simon Boccanegra-a beautiful but complicated
opera about a young man who loses his daughter and
then finds her again twenty-five years later, having in the
meantime become the first plebeian Doge of Genoa.
There are such good human values in Simon, especially
in the relationship between the father and daughter. It
is the kind of role for which a singer should be older
himself. Vocally, it's very difficult for a young singer
because the center of the part sits low and yet you have
to be able to dominate. Vocally it requires maturity, but
also because of the special character of the father and
daughter relationship. The more you can feel about real
children, particularly having children of your own, the
better that will work.
Simone was also almost too good a man. If he had
been a little more savvy, a little meaner, he would have
dumped Paolo and never have allowed him the opportunity to poison him. Somehow he couldn't believe that
anyone could do something as heinous as that. So in a
way, Simone is naive.
Once on stage, the performer does not have the opportunity to think about who his character is; but part of
what sets Sherrill Milnes apart from less talented singers
is his ability to understand the man he is embodying.
Though operatic characters are indeed simpler and
louder and larger than life, for Sherrill Milnes they seem
never to cease to be human, even an enigma like Don
Giovanni. How evil is Sherrill Milnes' Don Giovanni?
There's a balance. In a Salzburg production by JeanPierre Ponnelle he staged it so that at the end, when
Giovanni goes to hell, my body is still there on stage and
Leporello covers me with my cape. Each person comes
up to me and sings their parts and there's almost a sense
that, "Gee, it's almost too bad he had to ... No, no, no,
he was an evil man and the right thing happened:' There
was a little sense that life was more interesting with him
around. There was just a touch of that. But the Giovanni
must also be dangerous enough to merit his demise. If
he's just a happy-go-lucky Giovanni who likes the girls,
and likes to play jokes a lot, then he's not an important
enough representative of the forces of evil to merit
everlasting damnation. He has to be dangerous. Funloving, but mercurial. He doesn't mind killing. He's
rather amoral, although that's not really true. I think
he does have his own code of ethics. When he kills the
Commendatore he senses for the first time in his life that
something may be going awry. He has broken one of
his codes. He has fought an old man although he had
tried not to. He still does it. He doesn't run away.
Someone from his own rank. An old man. And I have
the feeling that some kind of an alarm goes off inside
Giovanni even when he runs him through, and certainly
in the recitative right after. He doesn't exactly feel
remorseful, because I don't think he knows how to feel
remorseful. But for the first time in his life he may be
worried. A little alarm goes off, so that in the first
recitative, "Leporello, ove sei?" he evidences his concern.
Leporello asks, "Who's dead? You, or the old one?" and
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Giovanni responds, "Que demando la bestia? Il vecchio!"
In that response, especially if one pauses between the
phrases, one can hear the warning going of£ I killed an
old man though he forced me into it. I could have
avoided it. It was wrong of me. Of course I was going
to beat him. And I shouldn't have done it. It is this little
alarm that seems to keep pushing Giovanni through the
entire opera. All operas at that time were 24 hour operas.
Everything took place in 24 hours. And Giovanni is propelled through this time as if he's saying, 'We're going
to have fun even if it kills us." He and the time keep racing on. For all of Giovanni's recitatives I would almost
run onto the stage. He's racing around through the town
as if saying to himself, "Why did I do this? What am
I going to do?" And he's worried. He's never been worried before. Now sometimes he forgets this alarm, like
when he sees Zerlina and is distracted. But for the most
part, it's always there driving him onward.
Mr. Milnes was then asked about the difference between Mozart's Don Giovanni and the Don Juan stories
and legends that can be read in books. What happens
to the story when it becomes an opera?
The beauty of the music is of course the first thing, and
then the emotional power of this story being presented
as an opera. One is hit over the head with the emotional
power of the story when it is accompanied by Mozart's
music. You don't seem to get emotionally tied to the
various Don Juan stories in the same way. The great
beauty of the music creates bigger-than-life emotions so
that it can reach out in a much more overt and powerful way to say Something that the stories cannot say by
themselves.
One thing that is striking about Don Giovanni is that
even though the Don is the title role in what is often
considered the 'perfect opera, from a performer's standpoint, Don GioVanni himself is very shy. When you take
away the recitatives, as you do when the singers rehearse
just with the orchestra, Giovanni has very little to say.
And yet he is the driving force. The opera has to hinge
on him. Yet it is the other people in the opera who have
all the big set pieces. He has only the ~h'}inpagne aria
and the serenade, and in the serenade he is disguised.
And both of those pieces are very s~ort. The most satisfying scene with the orchestra is the supper scene where
Giovanni really gets to sing. At all other-times he'S plways
playi?-g at. s<_>n:ething el~e, ~ven playin~ at being <?iovanm. So It IS m the reCitatlves that he has· the most to
say and where he is most hill¥'elf. This is the hardest
part to communicate to the audie-nce-the conversational
things- because it is pure language. Yet this is where
Giovanni is most himself. And with Leporello he is
always himself.
When you are playing Giovanni onstage, you are not
thinking about the question of good and evil that governs
the opera. You are doing the human things that a
Giovanni would do in this stylized story. We have to
assume that he spent three days with Elvira and couldn't
stand her anymore. And he doesn't get to Zerlina for
a variety of reasons. In the opera, during those last 24
hours, Giovanni succeeds with no one. It's really the rise
and fall of Don Giovanni and the opera deals with the
fall- the last 24 hours of his life.
39
�Dynamic Symmetry,
A Theory of Art and Nature
Howard J. Fisher
J
ust before the onset of the 1920s there began to
be promulgated a certain theory that was partly
mathematical, partly historical, and partly
aesthetic. This theory was the invention of Mr.
] ay Hambidge, who was an artist and designer,
and by it he set out to explicate some remarkable
characteristics he had found in classical Greek and Egyptian designs. He propounded the theory under the title,
"Dynamic Symmetry." This name was meant to be a
translation of the Greek mathematical expression &uv<i.~Et
aUJ.LJ.LE'tpm, a term we know from Euclid. The Euclidean
expression describes a relation between magnitudes
which, though incommensurable directly in length, are
"commensurable in square!' The side and diagonal of a
square are two such magnitudes. As we well know, these
two magnitudes have no common unit. But the squares
constructed upon them respectively do have a common
unit; in fact the square on the diagonal is just double
the square on the side, as we learn in Meno.
"Dynamic Symmetry;' then, is a study of magnitudes
that are commensurable in square only. It is too bad that
both words have acquired meanings that are rather distant from their Greek cognates, as it makes the name
of the study somewhat non-explanatory today. But the
name "Dynamic Symmetry" has survived; and in any
case, respect for ] ay Hambidge's steadfast pioneering
probably dictates that we should retain it.
Hambidge did not take a mathematician's approach
to the incommensurables. His study was applied exclusively to problems of design and proportion in archi-
Howard Fisher is a tutOr at St. John's College, Annapolis. Dynamic ~mmetry,
A Theory of Art and Nature, was originally given as a lecture under the title,
A Grecian Uf?l, at St. John's College, Annapolis in April of 1984.
40
tecture, pottery, sculpture, landscaping, furnituremaking, typography, and other arts. In fact he regarded
Dynamic Symmetry as a rediscovered ancient art of
design and composition which had been perfected by
Egyptian and, especially, by Greek craftsmen long before
its more refined appearance as a ·theoretical science in
the mathematics of Euclid and others.
According to an account which Hambidge accepted,
Greek artisans had obtained from the Egyptians their
techniques for correlating design elements during the 7th
and 6th centuries B. C. E. They perfected this knowledge
as a practical geometry which for some 300 years provided the basic principles for design in the Classic period.
Traces of this practical geometry survived, in a more
highly evolved, mathematized form, in Euclidean
geometry; but the secrets of its·original artistic application otherwise disappeared. Sadly, no accounts remain
that would reveal to us how the ancient craftsmen
developed their designs or what principles and elements
they may have employed. In the absence of historical
evidence, the principles that guided the makers must be
sought through examination· of the surviving works
themselves. This means that any theory of the design of
these things must begin by advancing a theory of analysis:
it must instruct the spectator how to approach the work
in order to understand it as a composition.
In this Egyptian bas-relief (Fig. 1) the goddess is supporting a formalized sky in the shape of a bar. The space
between the vertical_ bars on each side is in the original
filled with hieroglyphic writing, which is not shown in
the sketch.
To analyze this design, Dynamic Symmetry looks first
to the containing rectangle AE; then to subordinate rectangles such as AC, DE, and FB, that appear to indicate
an underlying scheme to the composition. Rectangles DE
WINTER 1985
�A
mathematical language in their reconstruction it is our
task to see through the mathematized version, so to speak,
and to recover what we can of the ancient practices in
their own terms. These practices, in Hambidge's view,
would have been exclusively empirical. They were, from
the first and always, directed to the ends of making, to
the employment of human powers in a world riddled with
other powers both active and passive.
I
\
I
\
\
\
\
\
E
Figure 1
and FB are directly given by the hieroglyphic columns.
Rectangle CB (which is a square) is determined by the
tops of the columns. The goddess's head occupies the
space between the two remaining squares in the upper
corners.
In all cases it is the proportions of the rectangles, the
ratios of their sides, that the analysis seeks to uncover.
For according to Hambidge, all rectangles other than the
squares that were used by the classical designers have sides
that are not commensurable in length, but are only commensurable in square- 8uvcij.tm. cr(>~_q.t&Tpm.
The first labor of Dynamic Symmetry is, then, to
bring to light the elementary rectangles that govern the
classical designs. Yet this enterprise cannot proceed
without a simultaneous investigation into the geometric
properties of these rectangles, of their possibilities for
combination, subdivision, and exhaustion, as well as
other relations. Euclidean geometry is the science that
investigates these properties. I will therefore first set out
some of the elements of Dynamic Symmetry from a
geometrical point of view. Then I will discuss a few
examples of how these are thought to have been made
use of in the design of some works of Greek pottery and
architecture. Such is the order that Hambidge himself
followed in most of his writings; but it has this defect,
that it inevitably makes it appear that knowledge of
mathematical theory was prior to the design process, or
that the designer was striving to illustrate some
geometrical theorem in his work. Any such view would
of course be highly anachronistic, and is quite the reverse
of Hambidge's position. Nevertheless he has been
misunderstood on this point by at least one critic. 1 Let
me therefore emphasize that the Euclidean geometry shall
be only instrumental here. It is our indispensable pathway
to, as the only surviving remnant of, the ancient principles of design. But even if we are obliged to use a
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
If limited to the intended role of a translation from
the Greek, the expression "dynamic symmetry" properly
signifies only the mathematical character of commensurability. But Hambidge expanded his use of the
expression, playing as he did so upon a meaning which
attaches to the word "dynamic" in modern English. In
its modern signification, "dynamic" expresses the action
of force or the exchange of energy. Conformably to this,
Hamb1d15e tau!'ht that there were two kinds of symmetnes ·tn destgn. Opposed to "dynamic" symmetry
which carried overtones of life and activity, there was the
so-called "static" symmetry, suggestive of inertness. In thus
opposing "dynamic" to "static" (in the same spirit as did
Leibniz and the later physicists) he made the deliberate
and irrevocable step of tying the theorems of Dynamic
Symmetry to Nature- both human nature and nature
at large-and particularly to growing nature.
Let us turn to a thing in growing nature from which
we may make a beginning.(Fig. 2) This thing is the shell
of the nautilus, or rather the shape which that shell
preserves throughout its development. This shape is the
logarithmic or equiangular spiral, and though it can be
app_rehended under many of the different properties it
exhibits, we shall pay attention to its characteristic of continued proportion. The spiral (Fig. 3) can be understood
Figure 2
41
�as centering about a point or pole 0 (to which the curve
approaches indefinitely close). If, from 0, radii are drawn
meeting the curve in A, B, C, with the angles AO B and
BOC equal, it will be found then that the radius OB is
the mean proportional between OA and OC.
Now in particular let the equal angles AOB and BOC
be right angles\(Fig.4). Then since OBis the mean proportional it follows that if AB and BC be drawn, the angle
at B will also be a right angle.
Continued construction of the parallels meeting the
four radii, in both directions, results (Fig. 5) in the infinite "curve" called the rectangular logarithmic spiral. As
you see, this shape is strictly analogous to the smooth
B
c
~
A
~~
Figure 3
spiral curve, only it is constructed in jumps instead of
in the continuous progression that the nautilus shell
appears to exhibit.
Observe that since the angles at A, B, and C in this
rectangular spiral are all right angles, we may therefore
complete the rectangle ABCX in which AC is the
diagonal and in which, by hypothesis, OB is perpendicular to AC. This reveals the principle whereby a rectangular spiral may be constructed within a given
rectangle:
In the given rectangle (Fig. 6), draw the diagonal BD.
From a corner C drop CO perpendicular to BD, and
extend it to meet AB in E. Continue constructing perpendiculars EF, FG, and so on. Q E. F. Notice. that the particular proportions of the spiral- that is the ratios of its
c
successive radii or chords- are determined in advance
0
by the proportions of the given rectangle.
Now in the same diagram, extend EF to meet CD
in X. I say that rectangle EBCX is similar to rectangle
ABC D.
The similarity follows from the continued proportion
of the radii from 0. But here is a quicker way to see it.
Since the diagonal and all sides of the smaller rectangle
are respectively perpendicular to their corresponding
Figure 4
D~------------------~---------,C
c
[
A
\
\
\
\
,../ D
~~
\
\
~~
\
~~
\
\
Figure 5
42
~
\
~"'
;'"
AL-------------------~E~--------~B
\/
X
Figure 6
WINTER 1985
�elements in the larger rectangle, rotate the smaller one
through a right angle. The two rectangles will then share
a corner and a diagonal, and so must be similar- by
Euclid VI.24. This rectangle EBCX which was constructed on one end of the given rectangle and also similar
to the given rectangle is called the reciprocal of the given
rectangle.
The term '~reciprocal" also has an algebraic meaning. Suppose we are confronted with a rectangle (Fig.
7) contained by sides equal to unity and m, respectively.
What will be the length of the non-unit side of the
reciprocal rectangle? By the similarity of the figures, it
must be x, where
x : 1 :: 1 : m
or, algebraically expressed,
x=1/m
or
m=1/x.
I leave it to you whether the geometric or the algebraic
expression is the more fundamental.
_,
.,
m
:
I
I
I
I
I
B
Figure 8
I
J
Figure 7
Every rectangle has two diagonals, as AC and BD
(Fig. 8), as well as two possible locations for its
reciprocal- one at each end. So in every rectangle there
are four "poles" or "eyes" where the diagonals of the
reciprocal rectangles intersect those of the given rectangle,
as the upper sketch shows. Joining the poles G,HJ,K produces one central rectangle and four rectangles at the
corners. These are all similar to one another and to the
containing rectangle, since they share diagonals with the
containing rectangle. A little later we will look at a Greek
vase whose design plan grows out of this idea.
Now every rectangle exceeds its reciprocal. But there
exists a series of rectangles that are integral multiples of
their reciprocals. Such are called "root rectangles." Here
are some examples.
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Consider the rectangle ABCD (Fig. 9), which is double
its reciprocal FBCE. If we choose FB equal to unity, or
1, then DC equals 2. What then will be the length of BC?
As we have seen, the sides FB, BC, CD must be in
continued proportion, with BC the mean proportional;
hence
1 : BC :: BC : 2
or, algebraically,
BC'=2
BC = -J2 or "root two!'
Thus the ratio between the shorter and the longer
sides of each of these similar rectangles is the ratio of
one tb root two. For the rectangle ABCD in particular,
if we now take BC equal to 1 (Fig. 10) we then have the
longer side AB equal to root two. The rectangle is
therefore called the "root two rectangle:' Naturally its
reciprocal is also root-two, since reciprocal rectangles are
similar to one another.
It is easy to describe other root rectangles in the same
43
�D
D
E
A
E
F
B
I
Figure 11
A
F
I
B
Figure 9
e:
K
c.'
1', , / 1'\
)'"'
\
/
/
D
/
/
/
/
~'], /
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
/
,/
/
\
\
/:0>
I
/
/
\
\
I
\
I
/
\
\
\
F'
\
\
\
/
f'
\
\
I
I
D
E
I
///
I
i//
A
B
C
F
Figure 12
B
A
Figure 10
unlimited; there are as many kinds of them as there are
integers. But we must distinguish between root rectangles
proper-such as root-two, root-three, and root-fiveand others which are root rectangles in name only. The
way. For example (Fig. 11), let the side AB of the given
rectangle be triple the side FB of the reciprocal rectangle.
Then if FB equals 1, AB equals 3; and we shall have
"root-four rectangle;' so-called, is actually just a double
1 : CB : : CB : 3
or, algebraically,
CB =
-J3 or "root three;'
which identifies the given rectangle (and its reciprocal)
as the "root-three rectangle:'
Root rectangles, then, have integral relations to their
reciprocals. The root-two rectangle is double its
reciprocal, the root-three rectangle triple its reciprocal,
and so on. Clearly the number of root rectangles is
44
square. Its sides are in the ratio two to one; thus they
are rational and directly commensurable. So with all
other root rectangles whose integer is a perfect square
number; they are all multiple squares, so we will not con-
sider them to be root rectangles, properly speaking.
There is a more methodical way to construct the root
rectangles, which is based on their serial evolution from
a square. Consider (Fig. 12) the unit square ABB' K,
with AB and KB' extended as necessary. Swing the
diagonal AB' down to AC and complete the rectangle
ACC 'K. I say that rectangle ACC 'K is the root-two rectangle. For it has been constructed upon the unit as one
of its sides; and its other side is equal to the diagonal
WINTER 1985
�of the unit square, which is of course
..J J2 + 1'
or ..fJ,.
Therefore its sides are in the ratio of one to root two.
QE.D.
By a similar application of the Pythagorean Theorem
to rectangle ACC 'K we see that its diagonal, AC ', must
be equal to root three. Therefore, swing diagonal AC'
down to AD and complete rectangle ADD' K; it is clear
that rectangle ADD' K is the root-three rectangle. In the
same way, rectangles AEE' K and AFF' K are seen to
be the root-four and root-five rectangles.
Once a single root rectangle has been selected, the
designer can construct innumerable related rectangles
according to a procedure called "application of areas." In
Euclid, as also in Apollonius, application of areas is a
method of comparing unequal areas by comprehending
them under the same height or in the same width; only
attention is paid not to the size but to the shape of their
difference. This, like other Euclidean topics, Hambidge
viewed as the outgrowth of an earlier body of empirical
knowledge or lore, supposedly serving the needs of
designers. Perhaps for this reason, Hambidge was a little careless with the Euclidean terminology, preferring
instead a locution that was simpler than but not fully consistent with Euclid's. I am going to follow Hambidge's
account, but remember that it is not quite the same as
Euclid's.
Application of areas is indicated in a classical design
whenever we find one rectangle superimposed upon a
second, so that it shares a side2 or end with the second
square AC is here applied to the side AG of the rectangle,
within the end AH as breadth.) It then falls short, and
the part left over is rectangle DB. If a square, as AF, be
applied instead to the side, AG, it exceeds by the rectangular area BE. It is by such application of areas that
many design themes are developed. Let us examine the
process as applied to the root-two rectangle.
If (Fig. 14) a square AB be applied to the end of a
root-two rectangle, it falls short and leaves the remainder
BC. If then to the end of this remainder a square CD
be again applied, it again falls short and leaves the remainder EB. I say that EB is also a root-two rectangle.
Thus application of areas preserves the proportions of
the original rectangle!
A
VI -I
c
-
'
I;!
D
I
rectangle but exceeds it or falls short of it in extent. As
in Euclid, attention is paid not to the size but to the shape
!:;!
of the excess or defect, "in order," as Hambidge says, "that
"V
'
the area receiving the application might be clearly
understom::l and its proportional parts used as elements
of design." 3
Suppose a square, as AC (Fig. 13), be applied to the
end AH of rectangle AB. (Euclid would have said that
£
M
B
Figure 14
We could prove this by the methods of Euclid, Book
I. But I will show instead a straightforward calculation
H
B
f--------j B
I
A
P
S9uore opplied to end
Figure 13
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
G
A
of the sort Hambidge employed. It is more adapted to
the needs of the craftsman in getting results for a particular case. Euclid himself does much the same in some
of the later books, where the circumstances are similarly
specific.
Let AM be unity, so that AB is the unit square. Then
by hypothesis, AC = ..fJ,, and NC and DE are each equal
to ..J2 -1. Moreover, DB= 1 - ND; and this reduces to
2- ..fJ,. Hence the ratio of sides of rectangle BE will be
G
Squo.re applied to s'1de
DB= 'l__~..fJ, =..J2
DE
..fJ,-1
QE.D.
45
�I
Calculation is easier, even in the age of digital electronic calculators, if we allow ourselves the use of rational
A
I
I
/v
I
approximations to the irrationals involved, such as 1.414
in place of root two. But since inaccuracies are introduced
by the rounding process, I wanted you to see that in this
case, at least, the analysis is exact.
In the same way we can show (Fig. 15) that if a square,
as CB, be applied to the side of a root-two rectangle, as
CK, the space FB by which it exceeds the rectangle is
made up of two squares and another root-two rectangle.
If root-two rectangles CK and DB are applied to both
sides of the square at once, the rectangles will overlap
to the extent of DK, and we can see by the equality of
the sides of the square that this space comprises one
square and two root-two rectangles, as the sketch shows.
c
c
/
/
D
__....-
I
I
A
1
I
I
I
HJ
F
,x
I
I
/
I
I
'
E
\
G
·,
\
\
\
8
E
K
8
Figure 16
F
-----
EF are root-two rectangles, for they share diagonals with
the containing figure. To each end of the upper rectangle
AC has been applied a square; so, as we just saw, each
..f1.
{i_
---I
B
K
c.
F
j)
I
~
1--- --
-- - - - -
{i.
I
--I
-
-
- -
,fi.
I
-
- -
11..
-
--I
of the remaining rectangles AH and IC must be roottwo. These two overlap to the extent of rectangle IH,
which frames the goddess's head. (But notice the delicate
leftward shift of her face and throughout her figure.)
Now let us investigate the proportions of the remaining areas: IH, DE (which is the same as FB), and DK.
We proved (Fig. 14) that when a square is applied to the
end of a root-two rectangle the remaining area is composed of a square plus another root-two rectangle. But
in the goddess design, AH is a root-two rectangle, and
square AJ has been applied to it. Therefore the remainder
IH is made up of a square and a root-two rectangle. But
rectangle AC is a square plus a root-two rectangle; so
rectangles AC and IH are similar. And the end of one
of them is equal to the side of the other; therefore rectangle IH is the reciprocal of rectangle AC.
Turn now to rectangle DE. It is the excess area that
arises when square CB is applied to the side of root-two
rectangle DB. As the previous diagram (Fig. 15) showed,
it must be composed of two squares plus a root-two rectangle. And in the same diagram we saw that rectangle
DK has to be made up of one square and two root-two
rectangles.
There is a remarkable pervasiveness of the root-two
Figure 15
Application of areas is striking in the composition of
the Egyptian design that served as our first example.(Fig.
16) The containing shape for the composition as a whole
is a root-two rectangle, AE, sketched here as having been
evolved from square CB which is applied to it. DB and
46
proportion scheme throughout this design. We have first
the root-two rectangle itself, as AE, whose side -when
the end is taken as unity-is 1.414. We have next rectangle DK, with side 2.414, which is one plus root two.
Next, rectangle AC, whose side is 2.707; this is one plus
one plus the reciprocal of root two. Finally, rectangles
DE and FB, whose sides are each 3.414, or one plus one
plus root two. Serving as a common element in all the
foregoing rectangles-a kind of universal co-ordinating
element, since it does not belong to any single root family
WINTER 1985
�in particular- is the square, with side equal to one. Here
are the proportions, tabulated in order.
Length of Side
1:1
1
1:1.414
-J2
1 +-J'l
1:2.707
1+1+ 1/-J'J.
1:3.414
D
D
Ratio
1:2.414
Rectangle-Root-Two
Family
1+1+-J'J.
. These figures show the remarkable power of applicatiOn of areas to generate new rectangles which are still
expressible in terms of the fundamental rectangle. This
preservation of the proportions of the fundamental root
rectangle is what Jay Hambidge called the "theme integrity" of Greek design. Virtually all of the designs
studied by Hambidge show that the craftsman chose a
single root rectangle and held to it. We almost never find
combinations of root-two and root-three rectangles for
example, in a single piece.
'
Now the method of application of areas automatically preserves theme integrity among the resulting
rectangles- but only if the rectangle that serves as the
base of the s~stem is a root rectangle proper. Rectangles
with ratwnal sides cannot be classified into "theme" families
at all! 4 This is the mathematical reason why the root rectangles proper, rather than rational rectangles, were
favored by the Greek designers, according to Hambidge.
Only the root rectangles allow such universal harmonization between the elements and the whole.
I said earlier that the number of kinds of root rectangles is unlimi~ed. But clearly as we move to higher and
h1gher roots 1t becomes increasingly difficult to"
distinguish them visually from one another. Now according to Hambidge, the Greek artists seldom if ever made
use of a rectangle of an order higher than root five. It
would, however, be most rash to conclude that the reason
for this upper limit was imprecision with respect to sight.
I have here drawn (F1g. 17) the root-five and root-six rectangles side by side. They do resemble one another closely;
but I doubt that an>:one will maintain that the eye is
powerless to d1stmgu•sh between them, provided there
IS
of the music that is to be played. The criteria lie in the
intelligible forms, not in the sensory apparatus of the
beholder.
In fact there is a mathematical consideration, which
has nothing to do with visual discrimination, that singles
out the root-five rectangle. This is its close relation to
ano_ther rectangle which was regularly employed in Greek
des1gn- the rectangle of the "Golden Section!'
a sufficient artistic motive to do so. The considerations
h~re
are analogous to the tuning of musical scales. The
d1fference between the true diatonic pitches A-sharp and
B-flat IS small, to be sure. But we cannot know whether
it is insignificant until we know what are the tonal demands
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
Figure 17
II
As we began our study of reciprocal rectangles by
reflectmg upo~ the appearance of the spiral in growing
nature, so ~gmn let us return to another phenomenon
of growth m order to approach the Golden Section.'
Although there are a host of actually-occurring natural
phenomena that could be chosen, I prefer to consider
a somewhat fanciful one, which was put forward as a problem by Leonardo of Pisa between 1202 and 1228.6 This
is the question: "How many pairs of rabbits can be produced from a single pair in one year?" Leonardo sup-
posed that every month each pair begets a new pair which,
the second month on, become themselves productive. With this supposition he found that the number of
pairs in successive months would be:
f~om
1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, ...
These numbers follow the rule that each one after the
.
second, 1s the sum of the two that precede it.' This is a
summation series, but it is widely known as the Fibonacci
series· in honor of Leonardo who was the son of Bonacci·
that is, Leonardo Jiglio Bdnacci.
'
It is a remarkable trait of summation series that no
matter what chance number we may happen to begin
with, the series quickly begin to resemble one another.
For example, consider this summation series beginning
arbitrarily with the number 29:
29, 29, 58, 87, 145, 232, 377, ...
47
�In fact it is a theorem, which however I shall not here
prove, that all summation series, beginning with any
number whatever as the first term, approach without limit
the same ratio between successive terms. We can already see
that this ratio, whatever its exact value (a value which
is in fact irrational), can be given approximately by the
ratio of the last two terms of the two series which so nearly
resemble one another; that is to say, by 377/233 or
377/232 -which is a value around 1.61 or 1.62. Let us
designate the exact value of the ratio, whatever it turns
out to be, by the letter <p (for Fi-bonacci?). I will show
you later how to express it more exactly. And let us ask
the following question: "Is there a sequence which meets
both the requirements of continued summation and continued proportion simultaneously?" That is, is there a
sequence
such that for any three successive terms these relations
hold:
D
r
c.
E
'
'
"-
/
"-
"-
I
I
'
I
' '
I
"-
I
"-
"-
I
"-
I
"-, ol
'(;!
I
J
I
'-
'
I
F
A
'l'f
"-
"-
"-
B
Figure 18
(1)
and
?
(2)
If there is such a series, it will exhibit simultaneously
characteristics of the growth of the nautilus and also the
growth of a population of Leonardo's rabbits; for each
of its terms will be at the same time a mean proportional
and an arithmetic difference between the two neighboring
terms. I don't know if that remarkable combination is
enough to make you want to call it "Golden." It is in any
case reminiscent of the problem that faced the Demiurge
in Plato's Timaeus: the simultaneous control of geometric
and arithmetic means in the tuning of the Pythagorean
scale. Suppose then, that there is such a series; divide
the terms of equation (2) through by an+ 1> and we have
rectangle FC has the same relation to the given rectangle
as was set forth earlier in Figure 7, and thus it is the
reciprocal of the given rectangle. QE.D.
The rectangle whose sides are in golden ratio to one
another is called, it will come as no surprise to hear, ,the
"Golden Rectangle;' and we can state the following
theorem about it, which is merely a restatement of what
has just been proved: "When a square is applied to the
end of a golden rectangle, it is deficient by a space which
is itself a golden rectangle!'
By this same relation we are also in a position to
calculate <p. Since <p and its reciprocal must differ by
unity, or
<pi- 1/<p, = 1,
Multiply through by <p for the following quadratic
equation:
which can also be written
<p -1 =1/<p.
What this tells us is, <p has a value that exceeds unity
by its own reciprocal. No rational value of <p can satisfy
this condition. But we can give geometrical expression
to it as follows.
Consider a rectangle DB (Fig. 18) whose sides are
in the golden ratio to one another: let the sides be <p and
1, respectively. Then this rectangle must be composed of a square
plus its own reciprocal, according to the relation we just
derived. For AB = <p, and let square DF be constructed
so that AF = 1. Then FB = <p -1 =1/<p as above. Therefore
48
Reducing this by the quadratic formula (but ignoring
the negative root), we have
m= 1 +..J5,1618
2
.
'Y
which value is nicely in line with our earlier estimate.
We thus have the ratio of sides of the golden rectangle.
It remains only to show how to construct the golden
rectangle, since its dimensions are not rational. Euclid
gives two methods: Proposition 11 of Book II, To cut a
given finite straight line so that the rectangle contained
WINTER 1985
�by the whole and one of its segments is equal to the square
on the remaining segment; and Proposition 30 of Book
VI, To cut a given finite straight line in mean and extreme ratio. Either of these methods suffices, but here
is a shorter way that is given by Hambidge and many
other writers.
With AB as base (Fig. 19), construct the square
ABCD, and let BC be bisected at E. Join ED, and extend BC to F, where EF equals ED. Complete rectangle
AF. I say that rectangle AF is the golden rectangle; and
rectangle DF is the reciprocal, for it is deficient by a
square.
For let AB equal unity.
J
D
A
//
/
/
\
/
\
I
I
I
I
I
I
vv
\'""'
":I
\/
H
B
E
'
\
\
\
\
\
I
\
'
\
I
\
I
I
~,~
\
I
' '
I
\
G
c
F
Figure 20
DE='-"(\1,) 2 +1'-
V,..j5
+ V,..j5
1 +..J5
BF= V,
or
BF=
cording to Hambidge, is found frequently in classical
compositions. In order to apply it to a particular exam-
2
ple, let us draw out a few more properties of this shape.
Let there be given the root-five rectangle AB (Fig.
21) with central square DC and flanking golden rectangles
AI and CH. Now rectangles AC and IH are also golden
and this, as we just saw, is cp. QE.D.
G
D
A
'-
I
I
I
I
I
""
"' \
\
\
<!-:./
\
"'I
I
\
I
I
I
I
B
E
C.
rectangles, because each is formed from a golden rect-
angle and the square on its side. Draw diagonals AC and
HI, intersecting at E. Through E, draw FG parallel to
the base, and draw also the vertical, EK.
We may then immediately identify four other golden
rectangles, namely EH, EI, AE, and EC; they are all
parallelograms about the diameters IH and AC, and are
therefore all similar to one another and to the golden
rectangles AC and IH.
A Greek drinking cup (Fig. 22) in the collection of
the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 7 illustrates the plan
we have just set out. What follows is one of more than
200 analyses which were published either by Jay Hambidge or by L. D. Caskey, late Curator of Classical Antiquities at MFA.
F
Figure 19
A
\)
H
In this same construction we see the close geometrical
connection that I said was to be found between the golden
rectangle and the root-five rectangle. In the same way
that we constructed rectangle DF in the previous figure,
construct (Fig. 20) rectangle JB on the opposite end of
the figure. I say that rectangle JF, formed of two golden
rectangles and a square, is the root-five rectangle.
For let AB equal unity. EH~EF~ V,..j5. But HF is
the sum of EH and EF; thus HF ~ ..)5, and rectangle JF
is the root-five rectangle. QE.D.
The root-five rectangle conceived as a square plus
two flanking rectangles is a design element which, ac-
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
I
K
C
B
Figure 21
49
�A
,,
\
\
\
'-
''-
\
f
'
I
I
IE
angle. But it was the circumstance of the pedestal base
being equal to the overall height that brought the figure
forth as a square plus two flanking rectangles, rather than
some other of the myriad ways in which the root-five rectangle may be subdivided. In Dynamic Symmetry the
concern is not with line but with figure in the sense of
/
/
/
-\-
'N
Euclid. (This is not "area," which is a notion that carries
metrical connotations that are no doubt anachronistic.)
'-
'
M
drinking cup, the containing figure was the root-five rect-
H
D
I
K
""
c
B
L
Figure 22
From the point of view of figure, as Hambidge several
times notes, voids function in a design just as actively as
do masses. In our example, the "empty" spaces FI and
CG- each of which· can be shown to be a double
square- are part of the spatial structure of this piece.
In the sketch, we see the main design plan for the
piece: the root-five rectangle I AB! serves. as the contain-
ing figure for the cup (minus its handles), while the central square DC determines the diameter of the base. The
join between bowl and pedestal is fixed by the intersection of diagonals, so that the rectangle AB containing
the bowl and the rectangle NC containing the pedestal
are similar to one another. Each is composed of two
golden rectangles.
The handles extend beyond the root-five rectangle.
If spaces AM and HL are added to accommodate the
handles, it is found by measurement that each added
space is (nearly) congruent with the area NC and that
each is therefore also composed of two golden rectangles.
Observe also that the curve of the pedestal appears
to be fixed in part by the intersection of diameters NK
and EI. Finally, the lower extremity of the handle join
lies on a diameter of the flanking rectangle, as AI.
Such an analysis as this one raises a number of questions. Are the geometrical correlations really essential to
this design, or are they just accidental? Moreover, do they
Now let us take up a more complex treatment of the
golden rectangle. This time I will simply assert the proportions of the design plan. The calculations are
straightforward enough, but they are time-consuming.
You will remember that when we were talking about
the reciprocal rectangles I called your attention to the
four "poles" (Fig. 8) which every rectangle has- these are
the centers of the four rectangular spirals that can be
drawn in every rectangle. Through the poles (Fig. 23)
of golden rectangle XY draw lines parallel to the sides,
X
I'' ' ,
\
w
\
I
I
J ',
//
I/
/
'f...
\
I
I
\
I
I
' I
'
I,
H
I
I
" "
'
'
:/
v
'
X
/
..
" / II
/-<..
I
I/
//I
J /K \
s/ /
\
\
I
'-
I
/ I
1\
/
I
taining figure; we cannot credit the root-five rectangle
50
'
A
reflect characteristics that are uniquely pertinent to the
with this relation. On the other hand, they will be golden
rectangles only if rectangle AB is root-five.
It would have been equally appropriate to raise such
questions in the case of the Egyptian bas-relief. If they
seem of greater urgency here, it is probably because of
the greater variety of things that are being counted as
"correlations" in this analysis, for example, intersections
of diagonals at a particular feature.
Hambidge's theories have been subjected to vigorous
criticism on just such points as these. • With your permission, though, I would like to defer their consideration until we have seen more of the kind of thing Dynamic
Symmetry looks for in a composition. One central idea
is illustrated in this example. Dynamic Symmetry is not
just a theory of ratios, but rather of spatial relations which
certain select proportions make possible. Here, works are
viewed in respect of their containment by a figure, and in
respect of their implicit articulation of that figure. In the
'-
\
i\
/
I
\ I
root-rectangles, or are they merely relations that are of
general validity? For example, rectangles AE and EC have
to be similar, no matter what proportions govern the con-
u
A
\
\
\
'
'-\
y
A
rp
<fJ
w
J
K
j'J
I
G
I
H
rp
rp
B
y
Figure 23
WINTER 1985
�as shown. We will then have golden rectangles at the corners and in the center, and squares WG, KZ remaining. Each of the areas AK and GB is composed of a
square plus a golden rectangle (Fig. 24). So we can
calculate the ratio of sides of figure AB; it is 3.618 : 2.618,
or 1.382.
A
A.
c
L
N E
--,
'I
''
/
J
!.,
I
L
E
/~
--
I,
/
~/
I
I
/'.,
I
t //
'
_ ; _ - --'L--
'
'
--
-- -/r----r,-- -/
'P
''
/'
/
/
/
I
I
I
' ,I
D
K
M
I
I
I
L/
''
/
/
/
/
''
'
F
Figure 25
I
'P
',I
-
/
I
I
I
/
'/ '
/
'
G
t
A
H
~-
the lower corner of the foot. The upper edge of a painted
decorative border coincides (nearly) with side G H.
The upper 2.618 rectangle functions this way: To the
applied squares AM and NK correspond respectively the
remainders LK andJN, both golden rectangles. The intersection of the square's diagonal, as AM, and the rect-
p
I
D
Figure 24
In his book on the Greekvase, Hambidge asserts that
many of them were constructed according to proportions
inherent in the 1.382 rectangle. Here9 is one of them (Fig.
25).
The containing rectangle AB is 1.382. Squares AH
and JB are applied at top and bottom to leave the remainders AK and GB which are 2.618. To the uppermost of these, squares NK and AM are applied; and
similarly also to the lowermost, as shown in the righthand sketch. The intersections of diagonals of the squares
determine the central rectangle CEFD, which is rootfive (for imagine it displaced to the right by the amount
FB; it will then be seen to consist of a square plus two
flanking golden rectangles). This central rectangle determines the width of the lip and the diameter of the bottom of the base.
The lower portion of the figure is governed by dimensions of the rectangle GB in conjunction with the central root-five area. The intersection of diagonal QD and
its reciprocal-producing perpendicular RS determines the
level of the top of the base. Diagonal DG passes through
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
angle's diagonal, as JN, determines the level of the upper edge of a decorative border.
Finally, consider a line PT which bisects the containing rectangle just above the vase's greatest width.
Diagonals PB and TV intersect at a level which determines the lower edge of the decorative border, while the
diagonal PD passes through the upper corner of the foot.
Our two vases illustrate that the classical mode of
employment of the golden rectangle was more subtle than
some investigators have appreciated. Although both pieces
depend decisively upon the compositional properties of
the golden rectangle, neither employs it as the overall
containing shape. In fact, of the rectangles that do function as containing shapes in Greek pottery, the golden
rectangle is by no means a predominating one, though
it is frequent. to
The golden rectangle has been characterized by a host
of writers- and researchers as the "most beautiful rect-
angle." Evidently, however, to the Greek designers a "most
beautiful" shape was not one to be slavishly perpetrated
at every possible occasion. Such an idea would be as
ridiculous as Socrates's comic example in the Republic
of the man who wanted to paint a statue's eyes purple
because "the most beautiful organs deserve the most
beautiful color:' Rather, as Hambidge observed, the
aesthetic significance of the golden rectangle in classical
design -lies in its value as a co-ordinating factor. 11 Its rich
system of relations and subtle potentials for transformation afford the designer immense scope of variation while
yet preserving the mathematical grounds of that unity
of theme which appears to have been so important in
Greek design practice.
51
�The methods of analysis used in these examples from
pottery are fully applicable in other arts. Except for the
dynamic symmetry. Nevertheless, Hambidge thought
relative difficulty of obtaining accurate measurements,
analysis of architectural works, for example, proceeds in
tually became the major part of his program to effect
exactly the same way and discloses identical geometrical
themes. In The Greek Vase Hambidge says: "There is no
essential difference between the plan of a Greek vase and
the plan of a Greek temple or theater, either in general
aspect, or in detail." 12 In all cases, Hambidge maintains,
analysis of Greek or Egyptian compositions shows that
the artist worked within a predetermined area:
The enclosing rectangle was considered the factor which con~
trolled and determined the units of the form. A work of art
thus correlated became an entity comparable to an organism
in nature.
Only such rectangles, simple or compound, were used, whose
areas and submultiple parts were clearly understood. If the
design for a vase shape were being planned the artist would
consider the full height of the vessel as the side or end of a
certain rectangle, while the full width would be the end or other
side. The choice of a rectangle depended upon its suitability
for a purpose, both in shape and property of proportional subdivision. A rough sketch was probably made as a preliminary
and this formalized by the rectangle . .. (The Greek Vase, p. 44)
that it was an inferior kind of symmetry, and it evena reintroduction of the dynamic techniques into contem-
porary design.
Here (Fig. 26) is a sketch of a ground plan that appears in one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. It is easy
to see how the plan is based upon the multiple repetition of the little square as unit. This is severe static sym-
metry.14 What is most lacking in this kind of design, as
compared with the dynamic designs we have studied, is
the sense of governance by the containing whole. The
subdivisions in the Leonardo design are not obtained
from the containing figure but from the Cartesian grid
( ]_
~
,....., ,..-
,....
Of all the virtues that Hambidge found in designs
~
based on d)rnamic symmetry principles, this character
of governance by the whole was probably in his view the
-
cardinal virtue. Its mathematical basis is the recurrence
of the ratio of the fundamental rectangle when given areas
are subdivided by application of areas-a recurrence that
is peculiar to the root rectangles and which we have
already recognized under the name of "theme integrity!'
The intimate harmonization of whole and part was
for Jay Hambidge a reflection of the organic designs produced in nature, and this impelled him to play increasingly upon the word "dynamic!' Gradually abandoning
its original, severe role- the mere translation of the
mathematical adverb ovv<ii'H-he more and more began
to rely upon a more current usage, a usage increasingly
expressive of force, life, and energy.
Hambidge repeatedly contrasted the dynamic symmetry of figure and its associations with life and organism
with an inferior,\ arithmetic"\ kind of symmetry that is
based on the lineal unit, or direct commensurability of
line. This kind of symmetry he called "static." "Static" symmetry so-called is based on a fixed unit. It is the kind
of ubiquitous commensurability we come up with when
we design on graph paper. "Static" symmetry characterizes
the art of most of the great civilizations, ancient and
modern. According to Hambidge, only the Egyptians and
the Greeks mastered the practices of dynamic symmetry:
and even the Greeks seem to have gone through a stage
of "quasi-static" design before bringing the dynamic
techniques to full fruition -and later, in the Hellenistic
period, to have reverted to the static methods. Certainly
the great Renaissance artists used static rather than
52
\I
r7 "\.
\
I 1'\
"/ " '
v
/
I
:'\ "
~ -
ltci
'
v
./
/
/
:,.-....
i'-'
\
)
If.}_
Figure 26
(or "trellis;' as Hambidge calls it). In fact this trellis vies
with the containing shape for dominance and may even
appear to be logically prior to it. A Cartesian grid is essentially infinite 15 and is "contained" only in a most accidental
sense by the overall shape. "Limited;' in fact, rather than
"contained;' is probably a better word with which to ex-
press the relation of a statically symmetric shape to its
outline. There is no reason inherent in the Cartesian grid
why the overall shape should not have been wholly different; and if it were, the pattern of subdivision based
on repetitive units would be affected not at all.
When the grid pattern is as emphatic as it is in the
Leonardo sketch, we can easily have the sense that the
grid is threatening to break out of the square into elongations and extensions. This actually happens -as when
an addition is made to an existing building. In any case,
the static treatment tends to emphasize measured, counted
space over shaped space.
"Static" symmetry need not be based on the square.
It is imposed whenever there is used a repetitiVe element,
whatever that element may be. It could be (Fig. 27) the
WINTER 1985
�equilateral triangle, the hexagon, or even one of the root·
was an antecedent specification- this is one of the ques-
rectangles. The mere deployment of a root-rectangle does
tions at issue) may not have been successfully achieved
by the builder, in the case of an edifice, or may have been
altered in the firing process, in the case of a clay vase.
And we must admit the effects of vandalism, decay, ero-
not achieve dynamic symmetry unless its peculiar potentials for explication by application of areas are made use
of.
sion, and other ravages of time in obscuring even the
dimension that was in fact achieved. Next, is it possible
to give a retrospective analysis of a given geometrical
form, otherwise undocumented, that can ever be more
than speculative? For example, if a certain architectural
facade should measure, say, 69.52 feet by 39.93 feet, for
a calculated ratio of 1. 741- are we to understand this as
an intended construction of the root-three proportion,
1. 732, or of the simple Pythagorean ratio 7:4, which is
1. 75? Or of some altogether different significance- or
none at all?
Furthermore, what categories of geometric "facts" in
a design are to be regarded as having aesthetic
significance? We found a feature in one of the Greek vases
that fell neatly at the intersection of two diagonals. But
in the overall design there are dozens of diagonals, and
hundreds of such intersections. The likelihood of a chance
IIIIIII
I
Figure 27
coincidence between a design feature and one of these
intersections is high, as Hambidge's critics have noted,
perhaps so high as to deprive even the most conservative
analysis of any statistical validity.
All of these criticisms were amply voiced during Jay
Hambidge's lifetime. He and his collaborators were not
without a defense of their position, but it cannot be said
that the defense is satisfactory in all respects. There reIII
To conclude this talk, I would like to voice a few
thoughts about Dynamic Symmetry as an historical
theory. Understandably, it is the historical aspect of Hambidge's teachings that has commanded most attention apd
generated most controversy. He asserted that the Greek
designers did deliberately aim for governance and theme
integrity, and that they consciously and masterfully
cultivated a system of empirical geometry to further those
ends. Given the nature of the available evidence, this is
an extremely difficult thesis to establish. Only occasionally can its components be formulated in a clearly testable
way; and even then, the "test" is not always decisive. Ham-
bidge and his collaborators repeatedly tried to show that
analyses of Greek artifacts according to dynamic symmetry principles were in significantly better agreement
with the actual dimensions of their subjects than were
main powerful inducements to skepticism, both of a
methodological and of an evidentiary nature. But despite
its glamour and notoriety, I do not think that the
historical aspect was the main component of Hambidge's
program. His overriding aim was to restore Dynamic
Symmetry to a place among the practical resources of
the contemporary working artist.
Most directly serviceable to the artist was his setting
out of those design objectives that are advanced by the
distinctive geometry of the root rectangles: elevation of
area relations over line relations, efficacy of the containing
rectangle, and the unity of proportion theme. Hambidge
never tried to promote these attributes as eternal or
universal aesthetic values; still less did he believe that the
techniques for achieving them constituted a recipe for
the manufacture of beauty. But he did believe that any
activity that aspired to creative power demanded a
substantial fabric of know-how and collective intelligible experience if it was to achieve anything. This credo
other, competing, analytic systems. But these claims were
found voice in his many and vigorous exhortations to
just as vociferously by other parties denied 16
Fruitful pursuit of this controversy is even now
practicing artists to put dynamic symmetry techniques
to use in their own work. Hambidge's rationale for such
hindered by a lack of sufficient understanding of the very
a redirection of artistic attention was that it would restore
canons of evidence themselves. For example, what level
of precision is to be regarded as significant in the
measurement of otherwise undocumented artifacts? For
a vigor and direction that, he felt, had been lacking in
modern design. There was, he asserted, a malaise plagu-
we have somehow to take account of the likelihood that
the dimension specified by the designer (if, indeed, there
preoccupation with the individual, the superficial, the
unique and the gimmicky. It had its root in a cultural
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ing twentieth-century art, in the form of an excessive
53
�malady that was more profound: our wholesale loss of
the vision of Nature as an objective but accessible intelligible order. For the artist, absence of such a public
Nature is equivalent to an emasculation of all the formal elements of his craft. Hambidge wrote:
Modern art, as a rule,.aims at freshness of idea and originality in technique of handling; Greek art aimed at the perfection of proportion and workmanship in the treatment of old,
well-understood and established motifs.
... this is the lesson that modern artists must learn; that the
backbone of art is formalization and not realism ... The Greek
artist was always virile in his creations, because he adopted
nature's ideal. The modern conception of art leads toward an
overstress of personality and loss of vigor. (The Greek Vase, pp.
44 and 142)
Hambidge's writings played down the real primacy
of his restorative program for the working artist. His
arguments were skewed to the historical question to a
degree that was partly unavoidable but partly needless
and misleading. He wrote as if it were the fact of the
Greeks' success with these methods-assuming it to have
been a fact- that made plausible a modern restoration
of the dynamic techniques.
The weakness of such an appeal is obvious; if the truth
of the historical claim is doubted, then so is the conclusion of superior merit correspondingly weakened. The
nature of the evidence, the evaluative tools of archaeology
and metrology, and the formulation of appropriate
statistical treatments were all in the 1920s too
undeveloped in the directions required by Hambidge's
study either to corroborate it or to refute it; and in such
a case weight remains with the skeptical position.
The situation is largely unchanged in the 1980s,
although comparable evidentiary and methodological
questions have begun to be addressed more adequately.
Much of this attenti9n has been in response to the work
of Alexander Thorn on megalithic monuments in Britain
and to other arChaeoastronomical investigations in
Britain, Mesoamerica, and the southwestern United
States.
Uncorroborated (but, I say again, equally unrifuted)
by other sciences, Dynamic Symmetry's appeal as a
modern design practice depended essentially on the persuasive powers of one man: Jay Hambidge. During the
short period of his public activity in this cause he was
active indeed. Besides his own research he inspired and
partly guided the research of others. 1 ' He published four
books (with two more that appeared posthumously) and
edited a journal, all devoted to Dynamic Symmetry. 18
He conducted classes and lectures for students in New
York and Boston, and he regularly addressed professional
associations of artists and designers here and abroad. His
influence spurred Tiffany's of New York to offer a line
of silver vessels made according to the "dynamic" ratios.
But Jay Hambidge died in 1924; and with his death the
54
influence of his ideas ceased to grow, despite the labors
of a company of dedicated followers whose numbers have
not vanished to this day.
I am sorry that obscurity has devolved upon Jay
Hambidge's work. Besides the metrological questions that
it raised, which archaeology and the other sciences of
antiquity will continue to address in one form or another
as their methods develop, there is that in Hambidge's
work which is particularly valuable to the spectator of
art, in expanding his observational powers. By forcing
our attention beyond the line and the curve, to the rectangular shapes they may imply, Hambidge opened up
what is literally a new·dimension in seeing. He once expressed the germ of this idea in the form of an aphorism.
It might be a little overstated- but evidently he didn't
think so. I leave it with you as a provisional final word: 19
"The line means nothing to design; the area means
everything."
FOOTNOTES
1. Rhys Carpenter, "Dynamic Symmetry: A Criticism," in
American journal of Archaeology, Second Series, XXV, 1
(1921). See especially page 35, where Carpenter assumes
that if the theory of Dynamic Symmetry is true,
"slaveborn humble artisans" would have to have known
a great deal about "all this geometry." For Hambidge's
opinion to the contrary, see The Diagonal, I, 1 (November
1919), p. 8 (note 11 below).
2. Generally I use "side" to denote indiscriminately either
the longer or the shorter of the lines that contain a given
rectangle. But when distinguishing them is important,
I shall use "side" to denote the longer line and "end" to
denote the shorter.
3. Jay Hambidge, Dynamic Symmetry: The Greek Vase, New
Haven, Yale University Press, 1920. Abbreviation for
references: The Greek Vase.
4. Rectangles with commensurable sides cannot be classifi"ed into theme
families. For the ratio of sides of any rectangle belonging
to the
Vm family can
be expressed as
c
where a, b, c, m are integers. The family will be a "proper''
root family only if m is a nonsquare integer; if m is a square
integer the radical can be eliminated and the family is said
to be merely "nominal" (like the so-called root-four family).
Any rectangle with commensurable sides has ratio p/q,
where p, q are integers. Then if possible, let
WINTER 1985
�Then, first, since p, q, a, b, care all integers, m cannot
have any nonsquare value; thus the rectangle does not
belong to atry proper root family. Moreover, with integers
p, q given and m any square integer, integral values of
a, b, c that satisfy the equation can always be found.
Thus the rectangle belongs simultaneously to all nominal
root families. Hence rectangles with commensurable sides
cannot be classified into theme families. Q.E.D.
11. Jay Hambidge, ed., "The Diagonal" (a periodical) I, 5
(March, 1920), p. 91. A total of twelve issues of this jour·
nal were published by Yale University Press; the first
dated November, 1919 and the last dated October, 1920.
12. The Greek Vase, Foreword, p. 6.
13. "Arithmetic" is my epithet, not Hambidge's.
5. The term "Golden Section" is of 19th-century origin. An
earlier term, "Divine Section," appears in Kepler and
other 16th-century writers. Proclus refers to it simply as
"the Section," and in Euclid it is the division into "mean
and extreme ratio." SeeR. C. Archibald, "Notes," in The
Greek Vase, pp. 146-157.
14. The plan also shows radial symmetry, which according
to Hambidge is another static form. '
6. Published for the first time in 1857.
16. Rhys Carpenter, op. cit.
7. MuseumofFineArts, Boston, No. 03.784. See The·Greek
Vase, p. 116; also L. D. Caskey, Geometry of Greek Vases,
Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Communications to the
Trustees, V, 1922, p.175 (Fig. 132). Caskey reports a
bowl diameter of 27.4 em and a height of 12.05 em
which, however, appears to be a misprint for 12.15 em.
According to the latter figure, the bowl diameter exceeds
a true root-five rectangle by less than 3 mm.
17. Especially L. D. Caskey.
8. E. M. Blake, "Dynamic Symmetry-A Criticism" in The
Art Bulletin, III (1920). Also see Rhys Carpenter, op. cit.
9. Pelike, Metropolitan Museum, New York City, No.
06.1021.191. From The Greek Vase, pp. 95, 98.
10. Caskey, op. cit., p. 6.
15. For a haunting treatment of this Cartesian truth, see
Jorge Luis Borges' story, "The Library of Babel," in Ficciones, New York, Grove Press, 1962.
18. Besides The Greek Vase and The Diagonal, already cited,
these writings ofJay Hambidge are listed in the Library
of Congress Card Catalog:
·
Dynamic Symmetry, Boston, c. 1919. Microfilm 36800NK.
The Parthenon and Other Greek Temples: Their Dynamic Symmetry, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1920.
Dynamic Symmetry in Composition as Used by the Artists, Cambridge, Massachusetts, The Author, 1923. N7430.H3.
The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry, New York, Brentano's,
c. 1926 and Dover, 1967. NC703.H25.
Practical Applications of Dynamic Symmetry, ed. Mary C.
Hambidge, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1932.
19. The Diagonal, p. 92.
•
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
55
�The Song of Timaeus
Peter Kalkavage
T
his lecture is about the strangest of Platds
dialogues, the Timaeus. I would like to focus
our attention this evening on the famous eikos
mythos, the "likely story," told by the character
Timaeus.
The likely story tells about the beginnings of the visible, touchable world. Our story-teller, Timaeus, takes us
through the process by which the world was generated
from its most radical causes and principles. Whereas the
Republic dramatizes the founding of regimes both in city
and in soul, the likely story shows the founding of the
cosmic regime, the government of the world. For
Timaeus, the world's founding depends to a great extent on the power of mathematics. Throughout the likely
story, Timaeus draws the listener's attention to the arts
of arithmetic, geometry, and especially the theory of ratio
we find in the fifth book of Euclid's Elements. Timaeus'
physicist is a mathematical physicist, and his bond with
mathematics expresses his dream that the world be wellgoverned, that the cosmos no less than souls and cities
display the virtues of stability, moderation, and wisdom.
Timaeus at one point articulates the motto of such a
physicist. It takes the form of a little jingle in Greek: pan
de to agathon kalon, kai to kalon ouk ametron; "All the good
is beautiful, and the beautiful is not measureless:' 1 The
physicist for Timaeus represents all that is decent, healthy,
and beautifully arranged, all that is conveyed by that rich
Greek word kosmos. Throughout the likely story, goodness
is associated with the beautiful structures of mathematics,
and badness is associated with the ugliness of disorder.
Peter Kalkavage is a tutor at St. John's College, Annapolis. The Song of Timaeus
was originally delivered as a formal lecture at St. John's College, Annapolis
in 1984.
56
I will try in this lecture to say what the world, our world,
looks like through the eyes ofTimaeus' motto about the
good, the beautiful, and the measured.
The Timaeus is the most artful and artificial of all the
Platonic dialogues. There is really not anything in it that
could be called conversation. And the dialogue as a whole,
so plentiful in references to life and motion, seems
somewhat lacking in vitality and spontaneity. The major
.characters ---'Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates- meet
Socrates according to a preestablished plan. Socrates
appears in a most uncharacteristic way. He is dressed up,
kekosmemenos, as though he were going to some formal
event. 2 Socrates expresses a desire for a war-movie in
speech, then seems eager just to sit back and listen. The
entire program is presented with extreme formality by
Critias. 3 In fact, all the speeches to be given do constitute
a formal event. That event is the feasting of Socrates,
the dialogue's central dramatic image.
The likely story of Timaeus fits well into this highly
artful setting. Artfulness plays the central role in Timaeus'
mythical physics. The very word kosmos suggests not only
a world-order b_ut ornamentation. Timaeus' story is composed of what Socrates calls a prelude and a song4 The
pair of terms also means preamble and law. The song of
Timaeus, the nomos as Socrates calls it, embraces two
forms of artfulness, that of music and that of politics.
Timaeus' speech will show us how artfully arranged the
world of becoming is. His song sings the praises of the
god Kosmos, who for Timaeus is the whole of all
generated things.
The Platonic dialogues are all imitations oflive conversations. They are living images, dramas. This is true
even of the Timaeus, which seems at times quite lifeless
and undramatic. Very often in the dialogues something
in a speech or interchange is not so much spoken about
as it is playfully enacted. In the likely story, it is easy
WINTER 1985
�to see what is being enacted, or rather re-enacted. It is
the birth of the world as we know and experience it. The
likely story is mimetic in this precise sense: it "plays at"
world-building. It imitates the noble, though often risky
process by which the gods made a world-order. At the
beginning of the Critias, the dialogue which immediately
follows the Timaeus, Timaeus calls the cosmos "the god
who was born once upon a time long ago and who was
just now begotten by speeches!'' The likely story, in other
words, imitates the artist-god or demiurge. It is recreational. When god makes the world-soul, we are engaged
in the various. constructions. When the gods make us,
we are involved in the work of putting ourselves together.
The world with all its structure comes to light for
Timaeus in a divine activity we ourselves take part in.
Timaeus calls this activity of world-building in speech
"thoughtful and measured play!'6 Such play for Timaeus
is identical with the activity of the mathematical physicist.
To read the likely story profitably, we must therefore relax
our preconceptions about the serious nature of physics.
We must exert our imaginations and, I think, our sense
of humor.
There are many obstacles the reader confronts as he
reads the likely story. The story is very long and very
technical. Furthermore, it cannot help but strike us as
whimsical and ridiculous, a sort of prank. This is the
story, you remember, that Timaeus places in the region
of trust, pistis-' Yet what could be more unbelievable,
more unworthy of our trust, than some of the explanations we get from Timaeus? Take, for example, the story
of the liver. Timaeus describes the liver as a sort of movie-
screen for the soul. And the pancreas is said to be the
liver's wiper8 Is there anything less unbelievable, I
~
wonder, in the apparently more scientific parts of the
story? True, there is bound to be some sense behind such
unbelievable accounts. But even while we see a certain
sense to what Timaeus says, it is impossible not to say
to ourselves "Hah! A likely story." Whatever region fhe
likely story occupies, that region cannot be identified
simply with trust.
But there is another difficulty with the likely story.
The story is apparently incoherent. It is not one seamless
narrative but is composed of three stories. Timaeus makes
two radically different beginnings. And in his third story,
he makes no effort to show how the two beginnings are
related. This problem is the greatest occasion on which
the story seems to be incoherent.
Timaeus himself warns Socrates and us about this
problem the first time he uses the phrase "likely story!'
It is worthwhile quoting the whole passage in which the
phrase first appears:
Don't wonder, Socrates, if we are not able to pay you
back with speeches about the birth of gods and of the
All, that are not in every way in agreement with
themselVes and altogether precise. But you must esteem
the speeches we provide as likenesses inferior to none.
You must remember that I who speak and you my judges
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
have human nature. So, in order to receive the likely
story about these things, it is fitting not to search beyond
this. 9
The physics of Timaeus will be a likely story for two
reasons. The first is that the world is not a being in its
own right but an appearance, a moving and unstable
likeness of an intelligible, stable model. Proper speech
about the world must therefore take the form of imagery.
Secondly, the story-teller and his listeners are human,
not divine. They must know their place and not search
beyond the likely story. This passage ends what Socrates
refers to as Timaeus' prelude. Socrates' response to the
prelude is extremely interesting. He tells Timaeus to "perform the song;' a command which can also mean "execute the law."to
Now there are many strange things about the passage
I quoted. It is very important, first of all, because it is
addressed explicitly to Socrates. But the most important
feature of what Timaeus says is that he articulates the
limitations of the upcoming myth. Socrates is being
asked, as a human being, to take the likely story about
the cosmos as merely a likeness, not as the truth. That
is, the likely story begins with an apology and a caution.
But why apologize for a likeness? Myths after all are
likenesses. No one needs to be reminded of this fact. And
Socrates, although he tells many stories, never feels the
need to apologize for any of them. Indeed, we sometimes
feel that a Socratic mythos has the power of showing us
what dialectical logos cannot explain to us. At the end
of the Gorgias, just before the concluding myth, Socrates
says to Callicles, "You may think it is only a myth, but
I take it to be a true account:' 11 I take what Socrates tells
Calli des here to be true of all the Socratic myths. These
myths are images without apology because, as likenesses,
they aim at and in a certain sense contain truth.
Likenesses in this sense do not function as boundaries.
They are rather springboards for our perception of invisible, eternal truths. Socrates would never say, "You are
only human; do not search beyond the likelihood of my
story!' For Socrates, myths appear to belong to the level
of the divided line called imagination, eikasia, the level
at which images take us beyond themselves to that which
they image.'2
As I mentioned earlier, the story ofTimaeus is com-
posed of three separate stories. The high-point of the first
story is Timaeus' construction of the divine, intelligent
soul. In the second story, Timaeus unveils the receptacle,
the supreme condition for all body, change, and appearance. The third story is about the birth of human
nature. This third story is the most bizarre and most
playful story Timaeus tells.
The remainder of this lecture will be divided into
three parts, corresponding to Timaeus' three stories:
Part I-The Story of the Soul
Part II-The Story of the Body
Part III-The Story of Human Nature
57
�One reminder before we begin. Timaeus is a
masculine world. The likely story imitates Zeus giving
birth to Athena; a most accurate image, I think, for the
mathematical physicist and his various brain-children.
character in the dialogue, not Platds spokesman. Plato
causes us to reflect on the problem of a world not by a
direct encounter with the issues but through a human
Even when Timaeus introduces the "mother" of becom-
soul and its various motions, through the soul of
Timaeus. We will thus have two questions before us con-
ing later in his story, I think he retains his role as Zeus.
He re-creates the womb of becoming as a dynamic
stantly: What is the world; and Who is Timaeus? We
medium for artful, mathematical construction.
must be careful not to separate these questions. It is by
The likely story begins with ·the divine craftsman, the
demiurge, who gazes upon a perfectly stable and utterly
intelligible model of the world. The model or paradigm
simply is and thus experiences no becoming. It is that
being which the cosmos imitates at the level of regular,
no means clear that the likely story represents what has
come to be called "Plato's cosmology."
Let us now turn to the likely story.
Part I-The Story of the Soul
periodic motions and .the "laws of nature" which govern
such motions. 22 As the not-yet-actual structure of a mov-
ing world, the intelligible paradigm functions for the
craftsman as a kind of "cosmic blueprint;' a plan which
T
he deed imitated by Timaeus' story is the
birth of the world. The story is filled with
language that suggests begetting. Later in
his story, Timaeus will tell us that the world
guides the construction of the cosmos and in which the
various forms of motion, power, and life find their
is the "offspring" of a "father" and a
prophecy.
By consulting this model, the god tries to make
Becoming as beautiful, that is as orderly, as possible.
"mother:' 13 He will also tell us that the pyramid is not
only the element but also the seed of fire. 14 Human souls
are planted, originally, in their individual stars. 15 The
Before the divine ordering, Becoming is said to be in
a state of disorder. Timaeus calls this condition "not at
peace and out of tune."2 3 In order to regulate and tune
star-gods themselves are referred to as god's "children." 16
this ugly condition, the god consults not only the cosmic
blueprint but also the goodness of his own intelligence.
He looks within himself in much the same way that the
mathematical physicist looks within his intelligence for
the mathematical principles of order. The god desires that
the world imitate him as much as possible." To this end,
the god constructs intelligence within the soul and soul
within body. 25 The soul is that on account of which the
The likely story thus aims at being a likely biology as
well as a likely physics. Timaeus acknowledges that the
realm of becoming is also the realm of procreation.
But the central, overriding image for the likely story
is that of artful production, technt God is a craftsman,
a demiurge, who makes a world by giving it mathematical
order. This is very different from the story in the Bible
in which God says to his creatures, "Be fruitful and
multiply:' In the likely story, the goodness of a cosmos
derives wholly from mathematical ordering. Insofar as
becoming is good, it is mathematically structured. Fruit-
cosmos is a living being.
What Timaeus' construction means here is that the
cosmos is alive for the sake of being intelligent, not
because life is a good in itself. Life is present because
fulness is not good for its own sake. In fact, as we see
it is impossible, says Timaeus, to make the world in-
at the end of the story, the enis for begetting stems from
our mindless and tyrannical nature." The female kind
telligent without also making it alive. And unless intelligence is put into the world, the world will not be the
best and most beautiful of possible worlds. At this point
the cosmos is said to be an animal composed of body,
soul, and intelligence. The cosmos is patterned after what
Timaeus calls "the intelligible animal:'' 6 The intelligible animal contains the forms of all the animals that are
is derived from the "first men" who were cowardly and
unjust. 18 Procreation comes about because the first men
"fell" from their divine and orderly condition.
The theme of art is central to the entire Timaeus. The
dialogue takes place on the feast day of Athena, 1• and
there are numerous references to Athena in both the
Timaeus and the Critias. Athena is called a lover of war,
really living and are contained within the sensed cosmos.
the Titan Metis, whose name means craft or cunning.
The notion of an intelligible animal is one of the most
perplexing notions in the likely story. It is extremely difficult to see how an intelligible dog, for example, could
be called an animal. This difficulty comes up again and
again for the likely story. It reappears when we are asked
to accept the existence of an intelligible fire. 27 As a really
living, vibrant whole with all the signs of life, the sensed
cosmos appears to be more truly what it is than the
The myth about Athenas birth seems to me to provide
original it copies. The reason is that the sensed cosmos
an accurate image for Timaeus' re-creation of the world
is possessed of a soul. I think we need to remember here
that, although Timaeus appeals to the image-original
relationship we find in many other dialogues, this relationship has a special context in the likely story. It is in
wisdom, and art. 20 She is the patroness of Athens which,
as Pericles reminds us, philosophizes without becoming
effeminate. 21 I think that Athena, or more precisely the
birth of Athena, is one of the dialogue's implied images.
Athena was born out of Zeus' head. This intellectual,
masculine birth takes place just after Zeus swallows up
through art. Timaeus seems to be imitating Zeus. Having swallowed up the mathematical arts, Timaeus gives
birth out of his head to an artfully constructed, eminently
58
WINTER 1985
�the context of productive or demiurgic art. The artist
works from a vision of perfection that appears within his
intellect. So long as this vision is in the intellect alone,
the perfection is uncontaminated and stable, yet
unfulfilled. Fulfillment comes in the act of bringing forth
the vision of perfection, actualizing it in time and space.
In the context of productive art, the relationship of
original to image is the relationship of blueprint to fully
otherwise flabby and graceless world. This is much like
the way in which the Pythagorean scale gives structure
to the music we hear or the way in which Timaeus' song
as a whole gives backbone to our flabby conception of
the world.
It is important to note that these two contrary circuits which govern Becoming, the circuits of Same and
Other, are not confined to the heavens. The soul is said
actualized structure. The sensed cosmos, though an im-
to be "woven throughout" the body of the world "from
age, is nevertheless the fulfillment of the idea within the
mind of the demiurge.
Timaeus proceeds to show, first, how the body of the
world was constructed, and secondly, the soul. The body
of the cosmos displays the good and beautiful ordering
of mathematics. The four elements of body-fire, earth,
center to extremity?'32 The soul ensures that the entire
air, and Water-are arranged in a continuous propor-
tion. ' 8 The entire body of the world is then given spherical
shape and the motion of rotation. Soul is constructed
next.
The story of the soul is one of the most exquisite
pieces of architecture in the likely story. It is based on
a remarkable premise- that a soul can be built. In the
likely story, we are treated to a vision of a likely soul,
world is filled with the recurring patterns characteristic
of music. Musical intelligibility exists everywhere. It exists
not only in the heavenly motions but also in something
like the vibrating string. A string vibrates periodically.
It displays the togetherness of sameness and otherness.
The circuits of Same and Other are therefore not confined to a place. Like music, they do not belong
exclusively to the realm of body or to the realm of soul.
It is impossible to say, when we are listening to a piece
of music, that the music is either inside us or outside us.
It seems to be everywhere. We do not "stand back" when
we are really listening to a piece of music. The music
penetrates and engulfs us.
that is, a soul whose being in speech consists in its being
Tirnaeus' account of the soul is a powerful transfor-
constructed. This is all part of the re-creational activity
of the likely story.
The construction of the divine soul takes place in
three stages. The god first mixes together the forms of
Being, Same, and Other. This is accomplished, Timaeus
says, "with force."2 9 Next, the god articulates the mix-
mation of our ordinary experience of the world. The account requires that we see the world through the eyes
of the imagination. Usually we distinguish rather rigidly
between the inner and the outer; the non-extended and
the extended; the soul and the body. But in the likely
story the world is approached through the power of
likenesses. For Timaeus the soul's act of thinking and the
ture into a spine-like band, the sections of which corres-
°
pond to several octaves of the Pythagorean scale. 3 Finally,
he slices and bends this spine-like band into the circuits
of Same and Other. 31 You know these circuits from your
study of Ptolemy. Timaeus gives a two-fold meaning to
the circuits. They are the outwardly appearing motions
of the heavenly bodies and also the inner, invisible "revolvings" of our thinking, of our dianoia. Timaeus goes On
to tell us how the circuits of Same and Other, that we
see in the heavens, constitute the moving image of the
eternal which we call time. The circuits of Same and Other
cause the world to be measured by recurring cycles. In
this way, Becoming imitates the utterly non-moving look
of Being. Because of these intelligent circuits ordered ac' cording to musical ratios, the world is filled with
timeliness. It is characterized by time not merely as duration, but time as a principle of "right timing" or
seasonableness. Once the circuits are set in motion, the
world becomes thoroughly musical as the moving structure of time. The world is enlivened and also "set straight"
by the periodicity of rhythm as well as the periodicity
of the musical scale.
world's act of turning in a circle imitate one another. Now
our souls contain the divine circuits of Same and Other.
In the act of thinking we too "revolve within ourselves?'
The circuits are housed in our heads, or more precisely,
in our brains. This true self of each of us, the intelligence,
is planted in a star before being submerged in the violent
flux of becoming. As we gaze out and away from ourselves
into the heavens, we are in fact looking upon an appearance of our most intimate selves. We are in a sense
gazing within and not out towards a "beyond." Now gazing at the stars is an activity we all love. This ordinary
activity so often associated with softness and romanticism
has a very specific meaning for Timaeus. A star is
perfectly shaped, it is always brilliant, and its motions
are unwavering and thoroughly regular. Also, a star is
deathless. No wonder gazing at the stars can fill us with
admiration and longing.
We are remembering,
remembering what it was like, in our Golden Age, to be
entirely healthy and well-formed. Through the study of
astronomy we return to a likeness of what Timaeus calls
"the form of our first and best condition?' 33 Astronomy
vertebrae. Owing to its musicality and seasonableness,
is the true homecoming of the human soul.
Another powerful transformation of experience occurs
in Timaeus' story of the divine soul. This transformation has to do with that special phenomenon, the physicist
the soul seems indeed to function .as the backbone of a
himself. Timaeus' story "saves" this phenomenon. That
constantly moving order. It gives poise and rigor to an
is, it shows how the activity of the physicist forms a vital
I think it makes sense to compare the soul as Timaeus
constructs it to a spine. Our drawings for the cutting of
a monochord certainly resemble the spine with its
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
59
�part of the whole, how thinking about the cosmos is itself
the world's own most essential act. The likely story "saves"
the phenomenon of the physicist himself by allowing intellectual activity to permeate the whole ceaselessly.
Thinking finds itself reflected in the object of thinking,
especially in the heavens. This is another way of saying
that logos as thoughtful speech as well as logos as ratio
permeates the whole. The cosmos of Timaeus is an intelligent animal. It is always engaged in giving accounts
of itself to itself. 34 The physicist, then, does sporadically,
partially, and sometimes out loud what the cosmos does
continually, fully, and in silence. Strange as the likely story
is, it nevertheless has the power to account for the
presence of physics and the physicist within the world.
This should come as no surprise to us. As I have tried
to suggest in my discussion of Athena's birth, the world
of Timaeus has its home in the mind and speech of the
physicist. It is his brainchild. Such a world is not the world
in its originality but the world as it is re-created through
the powers of art. Throughout Timaeus' praise of the
god Kosmos, he is praising the physicist's god-like power
of re-creation, the power of bringing the world into being through speech.
The world is fulftlled for Timaeus in the physicist's
act of thinking. There are of course many wondrous and
admirable motions which the cosmos displays. Yet its
highest activity for Timaeus is clearly that of
thoughtfulness or reflection. The world longs, one might
say, to make itself known and articulate. Only through
the powers of intelligent human speech does the world
shine forth as what it most truly is- an intelligent, living embodiment of artful structure and purpose. Timaeus
calls the cosmos a "happy god:'35 This god would not be
happy, would not be fulftlled, were it not for the human
beings who tell likely stories about the world's structure.
Through the recreational powers of the physicist, the
world comes to possess something like a plot, a mythos.
In this way, the world comes to be an object of trust. We
can place our trust in the appearances only once we have
saved them with the peculiar powers of a likely story. At
the beginning of the story, Timaeus invoked to hhneteron, 36
that is, ourselves and our own powers of mathematical
story-telling. Our trust in the likely story is also our trust
in a world that we ourselves have brought into being.
Part II-The Story of the Body
I
n Timaeus' first story of origins, time plays the
central role. Time is said to be the moving likeness
of eternal, changeless being. I think this means
not that time as duration goes on forever, but that
time is one of the world's supreme ordering
principles. Timaeus agrees with Aristotle in the sense
that time is conceived as the measure of motion. 37 Time
gives the various happenings of the world rhythm and
periodicity. In the cosmic region below the heavens, the
world is constantly coming together and falling apart.
60
But this region is nevertheless ruled by the ever-intelligent
circuits of Same and Other. The world in a sense "knows"
when to do what. In his second account of origins,
Timaeus unveils the other supreme ordering principle
and dimension of a world- space as the giver of place.
For Timaeus, space, likt time, is a moving structure.
Space shakes what is within it. 38] ust as time is associated
with the world's stability, space is associated with the excitation of all things that have place.
Timaeus' first account of body at the very beginning
of his speech took the four elements of body as the uncuttable simples out of which body was composed. In
his second story the simple-minded notion of an element
proves to be insufficient. What confronts us in the region
below the heavens is the change of elements into each other.
Fire acts on water to beget steam, a form of air. Water
evaporates, steam condenses, and fire goes out, leaving
its descendants earth and smoke. The element of fire is
given special attention by Timaeus. Of all the elements,
fire is the most spirited, the most ambitious, and the most
desirous of gaining victory over the others. The elements,
in other words, are themselves unstable. They appear
in the wondrous display of appearing and disappearing.
In order to "save" this perplexing phenomenon, Timaeus
reconstructs the four elements out of the regular Platonic
solids.' 9
This ingenious construction accomplishes two highly
important goals. First, the elements are shown to have
parts. These parts- the various sides of the regular,
geometrical solids- can be rearranged to form other
elements. Timaeus' mathematical physics thus accounts
for the fact that an element can have integrity and iden-.
tifiability while at the same time being able to suffer
transmutation. There is a second goal which is of great
importance to the likely story. The regular Platonic solids
are called by Timaeus "the most beautiful bodies:'40 What
this means is that Timaeus accounts for the structure
of body in terms of principles that are beautiful and good.
Timaeus here puts to work once more the motto of his
physics that I quoted earlier: All the good is beautiful,
and the beautiful is not measureless. Of course, what I
have been calling an account of the elements is, like all
accounts of Becoming, a likely story. It represents the
attempt on the part of the physicist to construct the best
of all possible worlds in speech. Timaeus constructs the
paradigms or archetypes of the four elements. He makes
no attempt to deduce the real nature of body and change
from the supposition of mathematical principles.
Timaeus' second attempt to account for the world's
beginning unveils a new cause at work in the world.
Timaeus calls this cause necessity, ananke. 41 At one point
he refers to this cause as "the form, eidos, of the wandering cause."42 Fire does not act on water purposefully. Fire
burns because it has to, and water must evaporate
whether it likes it or not. In the second beginning
Timaeus makes, the world is seen as originating in the
cooperation of two causes- the good and the necessary.
The good is identical with intelligence, or more precisely,
with the ordering power and stability of intelligence. InWINTER 1985
�telligence is said to persuade necessity to take on the
beautiful structures of mathematics. 43
In his second beginning, Timaeus acknowledges the
role that mindlessness and chance play in the scheme of
things. This element of chance cannot be eradicated, nor
can it be fully mastered. Timaeus' reference to persuasion suggests that the god's work of ordering the world
according to an intelligent and intelligible design is
limited by the nature of the original condition in which
the design is supposed to inhere. What we have before
us in the guise of the necessary cause is none other than
the primitive and unmusical condition that exists "before"
the divine ordering. By leading us back to a reconsideration of this condition, Timaeus introduces us to that
dimension of a world which is distinct from the purposeful
activity of an intelligent soul. This new dimension is the
world of power.
When the gods construct our eyes, they do so for
reasons that are beautiful and good. We are given eyes
so that we might learn the intelligible structure of time
manifested in the heavens 44 By learning about this structure through astronomy, our souls become ordered and
healthy. We become assimilated to our first and best condition as stars. But unless our eyes have the power of seeing, no good will come of them. What I think this means
is that astronomy, although it functions as that through
which the human soul is rendered musical, is not sufficient for our complete understanding of the world. To
grasp the totality of our world, to tell the whole story
of the cosmos, we must become students of violent
change; we must study the world of efficiency or power.
There are no good ends in the world unless there are
powers to actualize those ends. Intelligence by itself cannot accomplish the actualization. As Timaeus informs
us, the intellect can only persuade the necessary cause to
work towards the best ends.
But what is ultimately responsible for this turbulent
though necessary aspect of the world? What is that in
which change appears? What is that in which the crafty
god builds his mathematical models of the four elements?
Timaeus calls this medium for appearing the receptacle. 45
He refers to it also as the mother of becoming •• and everexisting space. 4 7
Timaeus makes several attempts to say what the
receptacle is. This proves to be no small matter for the
receptacle, as the material ground or condition for the
appearance of determinate though shifting natures, does
not itself possess a determinate nature. If the receptacle
is said to possess a nature at all, such a nature must be
located in its indeterminateness, in its character as the receptivity to form. 48
Timaeus' attempts to speak about the receptacle take
the form oflikenesses. The receptacle is compared to gold,
which receives constantly changing shapes,49 to the
neutral base in which perfumes can be mixed, 50 and to
an instrument for purifying corn. 51 The use of images
to explain the receptacle is well-suited to the receptacle's
all-receiving nature. For the receptacle is not only the
medium for change and the womb of becoming. It is also
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
the ground of all appearance and imaging. It functions
like the surface of a mirror. As the womb of becoming,
the receptacle is "impregnated" with the mathematical
structures of the four elements, that is, with the regular
Platonic solids. The divine craftsman gazes at the purely
intelligible forms of fire, air, earth, and water. At the same
time, he is said to schematize the receptacle "with shapes
and numbers:'" The purely intelligible form or eidos of
each element is called by Timaeus "father:'" In other
words, the world of change and appearance is born of
two "parents;' the formless and all-receiving receptacle
and the purely intelligible eidos. Timaeus makes it clear
that the offspring which is the cosmos is something in
between its two parents. The world is neither pure
formlessness nor pure form but a peculiar mixture of the
two. The world is the presence of intelligibility within the
realm of flux.
Now before the divine act of ordering, the receptacle
is already filled with "traces" of the four elements. 54 What
this means is that the primordial chaos could never have
been ordered unless it were potentially ordered, unless it
had a predisposition to be formed. Since the receptacle
and its contents are in perpetual imbalance, the ghostly
pre-cosmic elements are constantly vying for each other's
proper places. Through its vibratory motion, the receptacle tries to send these wayward elements back to their
proper places. There is a marvelous poignancy and aptness in Timaeus' account of the pre-cosmic condition.
Since the dynamic interplay of receptacle and contents
persists once the elemental traces are schematized with
shapes and numbers, this interplay may be said to
characterize the world as we know it. As our experience
of our world testifies, things that are made, whether by
art or by nature, tend to become unmade. The world
displays itself as a realm in which things that are brought
to order and unity, at the same time tend to fall to pieces.
The world tends both to order and to disorder, a fact
seen most vividly perhaps in the founding of cities and
in their constitutions, but seen no less in the history of
all plants and animals. In modern theories of the cosmos
this tendency is seen even in those celestial beings, the
stars and planets. Timaeus' receptacle confirms our sense
that the realm of change is also the realm of mortality.
Timaeus' reference to "traces;' ikhnC-literally "footprints" -of the elements suggests that prior to the divine
schematism body does not exist. The so-called elements,
stoicheia or letters of the alphabet, are not really elements
at all. They are rather the result of a subtle and beautiful
construction. So far are fire, earth, air, and water from
the status of genuine elements, that a man who possessed
just a little prudence, according to Timaeus, would not
even liken them to syllables."
Body, then, comes into being only with the god's construction of the regular Platonic solids in the medium
of the receptacle, the medium of eternally unstable space.
Insofar as body for Timaeus can be studied, it is indistinguishable from a mathematical object endowed with
mortality. According to Timaeus' provocative definition,
body is that which possesses the third dimension of depth,
61
�bathos. 56 The definition allows Timaeus to identify
bodiliness with solidity, and solidity with threedimensionality. More precisely, body's solidity derives
from the dimension of depth. The depth of body takes
on immense mythical significance when we remember
that the cosmos for Timaeus is a living being, a being
with a soul. While it might seem difficult to grasp the
connection between the living character of the whole and
the three-dimensionality of body, Timaeus' emphasis on
depth does point to the absurdity of a two-dimensional
living being. But why should a living being necessarily
be "solid;' that is, possessed of the third dimension of
depth? The answer lies, I think, in something Timaeus
says about the soul; he speaks of the soul "circling back
upon herself;' autl te anakukloumene pros autin. 57 The soul
or animating principle of the whole, in other words, is
a principle of inwardness and reflection. One might call
it a principle of "depth;' without which the world would
be superficial and lifeless. The depth Timaeus sees as
the defining characteristic of body thus supplies a
home-mythically-for the eternally reflective source of
life.
I say "mythically" in order to remind us that although
Timaeus' account of body dwells in the region of
mathematical physics, its primary dwelling-place is the
realm of stories and images. Timaeus makes no effort
to derive the "real" properties of body from his
mathematical principles. The likely story supplies no explanation of the descent from the purely intelligible archai
to the world of body and change. All takes place by way
of analogy and image-making, so that the most technical
constructions (like that of the musical scale or of the
regular solids) hover between the invisible and true beginnings and the world as it is given to sight and touch. Fire
is not a moving pyramid; it is merely lik a moving
pyramid. Nor does the likely story claim to be able to
derive the mathematical structure of fire from the eidos
of fire, from "fire itself by itsel£:' 5 • Even at its most apparently scientific moments, the likely story retains its
character as a mathematical poem, a poem that places the
mathematical arts in the service of non-mathematical
meaning and "depth!'
In the entire discussion of body and bodily change,
Timaeus make several references to guarding and sav-
ing the power, the dynamis, oflikely accounts 59 Indeed,
an invocation of "Zeus the Preserver"60 stands at the head
of Timaeus' second attempt to speak of beginnings. In
the same breath Timaeus calls his second story about
a mathematics of body "a strange and uncustomary exposition." Zeus is invoked to save us during the strange
business of constructing a mathematical poem about
body. He seems to be the patron god of likely stories.
The account will begin in distrust, perhaps even in our
laughter at such absurd hypotheses as those made by
Timaeus. But our imaginations will presumably save us
from distrust once we see that the mathematical
hypotheses succeed in saving the appearances, once these
hypotheses supply a reasonably coherent story of body
and bodily change. The safety of a likely story thus stems
62
from our remembering that what we are doing is building
mathematical models or analogies, that we are being recreational. The likely story in this way dramatizes for
us what we now call a scientific theory. A theory must be
careful not to promise what it cannot deliver. It does this
by acknowledging and insisting upon its origins in a productive, imaginative intellect. Strictly speaking, theories,
for Timaeus, do not belong in the realm of knowledge
but in the realm of trust, pistis. For this reason,
mathematical physics aims at persuasion. It is a form of
rhetoric. The rhetorical connection between physics and
the world is strongly implied by the fact that the divine
intelligence itself is said to persuade the receptacle to
assume the best and most beautiful mathematical form.6 1
We must remind ourselves at this point that the entire
Timaeus addresses the problem of the world in its totality.
The world of all generated things- gods and men, cities,
customs, reputations, and also likely stories. All such
generated things reveal in their individual fates the life
of the whole to which they are subject; all reveal the pervasive and inescapable workings of necessity within the
receptacle. The receptacle comes on the scene in answer
to questions of physics proper. Yet Timaeus' mode of
speech suggests that we see the world of bodily change
as revelatory of the soul, of our souls. In fact, at the end
of the likely story, we find souls going up and down the
scale of animality. 6 2 This happens in just the same way
that the four elements of body go up and down in their
violent change of place. The cosmos, you remember, is
both body and soul. And the receptacle, as the mother
of all becoming, is necessarily the place of souls as well
as the place of bodies.
No one can deny the power that place as well as time
exerts over our lives. Time and place together have to
do with the meaning of a life within becoming. Such a
life is unintelligible without history or, if you will, without
the story or plot of a life. Insofar as an individual life comes
to be defined as a story, it is governed by the Where and
the When. It is of the utmost importance to us that we
have a place; and at the appropriate times it is good and
necessary for us to change place. Sometimes the change
of place, like the change of the elements, is not smooth
and continuous but is a violent upheaval.
Timaeus' account of the receptacle fits well with
Critias' story about the great cycles civilizations go
through and the great wars between cities. In Critias'
story Athens plays the role of the great liberator of the
political world. Athens fights against the insolent kings
of Atlantis who attempt to enslave the entire mainland.
But as we know from the account given to us by
Thucydides, the Athens of Plato's day launches an insolent campaign against the great and powerful island
of Sicily, a campaign which proves to be Athens' downfall.
In the course of history, the roles have been reversed.
What is true in the political order seems to be true in
the cosmic order as well. The life of the whole cannot
be identified simply with the serene motions of the
heavens. Life is not only intellectual activity; it is also
the passion and vibrancy which cause the whole to be
WINTER 1985
�alive in the first place, to reach glorious moments which
tend towards tragic decay. At the beginning of tbe
dialogue, Socrates says he is filled with a desire to see
the best city go to war, to a fitting and beautiful war.
Socrates seems to be mimicking our fondness for life in
the sense of passion and vibrancy, and also our desire
to witness a beautiful show of strength. Socrates is asking to see the best city transformed into a heroic city,
a feat that requires great skill in the making of lively
images. Timaeus' two stories of origins- the story of the
soul and the story of the receptacle- reflect the two senses
of the term life. The divine soul, manifested as the moving structure of time, embodies life as intellectual activity.
The receptacle embodies life as passion and vibrancy.
Both senses oflife are necessary if we are to tell the whole
story about the life of the whole and our own spatiotemporallives as well. Yet it is no easy matter to say how
these two senses of life can combine to form a coherent
whole.
In the last third of the likely story, Timaeus attempts
to "weave together" the two supreme causes of Becoming: the good and the necessary. 63 He attempts, in other
words, to harmonize the two senses oflife which the two
stories of beginnings have uncovered. We might expect
that given these two accounts of the world's founding,
Timaeus in his third story will tell us how the two different accounts of origination are reconciled, how it is
possible for the soul to be the first and best of generated
things 64 and for the god to have constructed the elements
of body first. 65 But Timaeus makes no effort to explain
how the first story of origins fits with the second. He
leaves us with two beginnings, two archai. This incoherence of beginnings is meaningful. It suggests that
neither time nor space was constructed first. The world
itself is characterized by a double beginning. Time as intelligence and space as receptacle interpenetrate but are
not reducible to each other. This doubleness of good'!ess
as intelligence and the necessity of the receptacle makes
its most dramatic appearance in Timaeus' account of
human nature. For Timaeus our nature and the nature
of the whole imitate one another. If we find an
incoherence in our own lives, a tension between our intelligent and our passionate selves, this is because such
a tension exists in the world which we imitate and to
which we necessarily belong. The cosmos for Timaeus
is something like the human soul, and the human soul's
incoherence, writ large.
Part III-The Story of Human Nature
W
e know from the dramatic prologue to
Timaeus' speech that the likely story is
intended by Critias to be a preface to
Critias' own story about Athens and her
day of glory. You recall that the Timaeus
begins with a very watered down summary of conclusions we find in the Republic about the regime that would
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
be best according to nature. But Critias is not satisfied
with Socrates' concern for a non-historical city, a city
which had no actual birth in the realm of becoming: ''The
citizens and city you went through for us yesterday as
in a myth we will now carry over into the realm of truth."66
For Critias, Socrates failed to given an account of the
best city insofar as this city would have an actual birth
in the realm of becoming and history. History-or rather
the memory of past deeds-is identical with truth. Critias
does not distinguish between the faithfulness of this
memory and the truthfulness of what he remembers. His
memory is etched with stories he heard as a young boy.
Critias scrupulously avoids the word mythos when he refers
to his own story. He claims boldly that his account is
"true in every respect." 67 It is through Critias, in other
words, that we come to be suspicious of anything that
has the character of a likely story.
Socrates' speech is mythical for Critias, mythical in
the bad sense of the term, because it was about a city
with no history. It was about form without motion and
place. Critias attempts to correct this lack by transforming Socrates' best city by nature into a young and glorious
Athens. But Critias needs a transition from Socrates' inquiry into Being to his own concern for a begotten and
therefore genuine city. Timaeus supplies this transition.
Timaeus will generate a world in which things come to
be and pass away in a splendid show of beautiful structure and purpose. He will construct the cosmic background
and context for the cycles of human history. As Critias
says, Timaeus will generate the universe down to the birth
of human nature. 68 What this means is that human
nature is the intended goal of the likely story.
Timaeus' story of human nature began just before
the gods confronted the problem of the necessary cause,
the cause of power. The star-gods, who are said to be
the children of the demiurge, put us together piece by piece,
organ by organ. What Timaeus shows us in this very
odd and at times repellent view of human nature is that
for him human nature is something neither whole, nor
natural, nor especially attractive. The human animal is
a creature of great vulnerability and multifarious needs,
and it is to these needs that Timaeus' likely story is addressed. Our neediness is summed up by the fact that
we are not spherical: we lack the self-sufficiency and
general happiness Timaeus associates with the spherical
cosmos. Timaeus' identification of happiness with
sphericity reminds us of the myth Aristophanes tells in
the Symposium. But whereas that myth attempts to ground
our happiness in the love we have for other human beings, Timaeus' story grounds our happiness in the study
of the heavens.
It is true that our complicated bodily arrangement
demonstrates how well-meaning and ingenious the gods
were. Like the world as a whole, man is a sort of cosmos,
an artfully arranged living order. But precisely because
man is so artfully constructed in the likely story, he is
also something artifical or, as we say, synthetic. There
is something grotesque about him. Man is a moving network of parts and functions. There is one and only one
63
�thing about man in the likely story that is completely
non-artificial and unconstructed. This is his passionate
nature, the nature that is at odds with the intellect's efforts to give life order and artfulness.
Human nature starts out as a head. The head contains the divine circuitry of Same and Other. To this head
the gods attach a torso and limbs to serve as the head's
means of transport. 69 The gods then put the mortal parts
of the soul into the torso. Spiritedness and the love of
winning go in the chest, and the desire for food and drink
goes in the belly. 70 An amusing and plausible topology
of the human soul! Timaeus describes this addition of
spiritedness and desire to our divine intelligence as a pollution of the divine. 71 To minimize the bad effects the mortal
parts of the soul have on the intellect, the gods construct
a buffer to go between the head and the torso. That is
to say, the gods invent the neck. 72 Like the belly-button
of Aristophanes' myth, the neck is a constant reminder
of our "fall" from sphericity and happiness.
Like all the bodily constructions we find in this part
of the likely story, the invention of the neck points to some
invisible truth about the human soul. Timaeus' account
of the neck shows us in its peculiar comic fashion that
human nature is ultimately absurd and incomprehensible. There is really no logos of human nature, no
reasonable explanation of how the best in use is related
to the worst. This seems to be implied also by the fact
that Timaeus compartmentalizes the soul: intellect goes
in the head, spiritedness in the chest, and desire in the
belly. One can only tell likely stories about human nature,
and such stories look at man in terms of artful construc-
tion. The ingenious invention of the neck shows us that
we do not cohere by nature. Intelligence has no business
mingling with the passions, but it must mingle with them
if human nature is to be born at all. The neck forcibly
joins the head to the rest of us and at the same time supplies some protection for the head's "private life" of
thinking.
In the likely story, human nature is the most mixed
and most terrible of all things. We are composed of all
animal possibilities the world has to offer- the highest,
the lowest, and all the stages in between. Our soul in its
humanness is everything life can be. In our heads, we
lead the divine life of thinking. But owing to our other
parts below the neck, we partake of mindlessness. Because
of this region below the neck, we run the risk of losing
our human shape in our next birth. The penalty for a
deficient life is transformation into a lower animal. That
is, contained within our human nature is the full range
of animal possibilities corresponding to the various forms
of unintelligent life. This range stretches from the stars
all the way down to the stupidest, most worthless animals
there are. But the cosmos requires even these most worth-
less animals if it is to be whole. Deficiency itself seems
to be necessary to the world order, and this deficiency,
witnessed in the moral hierarchy of animals, is rooted
in the all-encompassing nature of man. The cosmos approaches its final perfection and completeness for
64
Timaeus as the original, healthy condition of human
nature becomes degenerate with time. In the closing
scenes of the likely story, the cosmos receives the animal
forms destined for it by the "intelligible animal."" These
forms are generated, so to speak, by the need in man's
nature to actualize in timE all the possibilities which lurk
within him and which constitute his being. For Timaeus,
the cosmos is both just and beautiful: just because it seeks
a harmonization between type of soul and type of body,
beautiful because through such harmonization it shows
itself to be a genuine kosmos, that is, a world governed
by a wondrous symmetry and coherence, even for those
beings farthest removed from the motions of intelligence.
Divine care in this way makes a blessing even of the curses
that man's nature brings upon the world. This intelligent
care which orders all things and which seeks to make good
out of bad, perfection out of deficiency, seems to be an
instance of Timaeus' guiding song: ''All the good is
beautiful, and the beautiful is not measureless." The
beauty and nobility of intelligence consist in its care that
the good triumph in all things. This divine care for the
order of all things is the same as the generosity of the
demiurge. It is that goodness which Timaeus, at the very
beginning of his talk, characterized as the god's lack of
phthonos, envy_,.
As we have seen, human nature in the likely story
contains within it all the animal possibilities the world
has to offer. These possibilities spring from the complexity
of our own nature. This complexity which makes us what
we are can be looked at in the light ofTimaeus' two great
cosmic principles- the necessary and the good. These
two principles define human life as well as the cosmic
life. Timaeus associates the passionate part of us with
the necessary cause, with the receptacle. As always in the
likely story, goodness is associated with the orderliness
of intelligence.
When Timaeus introduces our non-rational nature,
he calls the passions "terrible and necessary."75 The passions belong to our necessary nature insofar as we are
absorbed in the life of bodily desire, honor, and victory.
The turbulence with which these passions fill us remind
us strongly of the turbulence within the receptacle.
The passions are necessary because without them we
would not be human. To have human life at all, we must
be absorbed in the impulsive, non-reasoning sense oflife.
To be sure, as long as we are men and not stars, life in
this sense is a condition for the life of thinking. If we
do not care for our whole human lives as human beings,
our intellectual life suffers. Thinking presupposes that
our lower desires are held in check and that we get enough
food, sleep, and exercise. Furthermore, if we had no
spiritedness we would lack the daring it takes to tackle
and solve such things as mathematical problems. But the
lower passions are disruptive, terrible as well as necessary.
Human nature is therefore in the following quandary:
the necessary condition for our happiness is also an
enemy to our happiness.
One might be tempted to think that the gods should
WINTER 1985
�have made our passions less terrible before they put them
into our souls. But this, I think, would deprive them of
their nature and function as passions. A passion, insofar
as it is a passion, cannot be anything other than consuming and measureless. Passion must contain the
possibility for being terrible. I think it is this boundless
and frightening character of our passions that Timaeus
points to when he says that the gods mixed all the passions with "love, erOs, that attempts all things:' 76 Since
the passions for Timaeus are causes of disorder, they must
be subjugated by the force of intellect. Timaeus is clear
about how the· intellect itself becomes fit to rule the soul.
It becomes fit through the study of astronomy. This study
restores our intellect, our circuits of Same and Other,
to the originally divine and musical condition we lost at
birth.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, the
likely story takes the form of a song. Timaeus sings the
praises of the god Kosmos. He sings the world into shape
with the beautiful constructions of mathematics and harmonics. The song of Timaeus, the nomos as Socrates calls
it, gives the world its musical and lawful shape. The center
of the song's teaching is this: all the good is beautiful,
and the beautiful is not measureless. It is now time for
us to ask what we are to make of Timaeus and his song
of order.
We know from the very beginning of the dialogue
that the making of order within becoming will be the
dialogue's central concern. Socrates gives us our clue in
his mathematical account of who is present. He counts
people. That is, he replaces their human identities by
their general characteristic of countableness. By counting his hosts, Socrates also implies the connection between time and number so important to Timaeus' story.
By asking where the missing fourth is, he implies the im-
portance of place in the dialogue, reminding us at the
same time that time and place always accompany qne
another. But the missing fourth remains unidentified
precisely because Socrates uses numbers instead of
names. Mathematics, it seems, has the power to order
beings, but it is powerless to identify them. Timaeus
fabricates an explanation for the absence of the fourth
host. Timaeus says he must have fallen ill, for surely he
would not be absent willingly from such a meeting. 77 A
likely story! The very first time we meet Timaeus he is
playing the role in life that he plays when he delivers his
speech about the cosmos.
The dialogue is filled with all sorts of playful
references to our desire for the orderliness and beauty
implied by that rich word kosmos. Even Socrates is ornamented, dressed up for the occasion. But it is in the
likely story of Timaeus that all the various senses of kosmos
find their most original place- in the world as a whole.
The cosmos is thus the paradigm and source for all the
ways in which order and the making of order appear in
human life.
In the light of what we have seen so far about the
likely story, let us return to our earlier question: Who
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
is Timaeus? What sort of man tells a story like the likely
story?
Timaeus is described for us by Socrates. Everything
about Timaeus is splendid, even his name which suggests timC, honor. He is an honored, powerful statesman
from Italy. He comes from a noble family, he is wealthy,
and he rules a city known for its good laws. Socrates also
says that Timaeus has "made it to the top in every
philosophy:' 78 Timaeus is the paradigm of the worldly
man, the successful worldly man. Unlike Socrates he is
an eminently public man, full of worldly experience and
known for his mastery of all learning. He seems too good
to be true, more like a work of art than a real human
being. I sometimes think this must be why, next to the
historical characters in the dialogue (Socrates, Critias,
and Hermocrates), Timaeus is conspicuously fictional.
He seems to be a likely story, that is, an ·unbelievable
though beautiful story.
Beautiful though he is, Timaeus makes us question
the virtues of a devotion to orderliness and accomplishment. Through the character of Timaeus, Plato causes
us to ask this question: Is it so clear that all the good
is beautiful and that the beautiful is not measureless? Is
it so clear, in other words, that orderliness and goodness
are the same? Even if we follow Timaeus in identifying
goodness with intelligence, it is far from clear that intelligence is good solely because it is a cause of order and
decency. In the Republic we get a different view of the
good. There the good is that which yokes together the
knower and the known. 79 In other words, the good is the
ultimate cause of truth.
The likely story is possessed of many virtues. Its
greatest virtue is, I think, its effect on our imaginations.
The story tunes and sharpens our ability to construct
and to identify likenesses within a world we are used to
thinking of in terms of meaningless facts. Through the
power of the likely story, the realm of body and change,
the object of the physicist, becomes a realm of meaning.
There are reasons for the way things are. We are thus able
to find ourselves reflected in the cosmos Timaeus builds
in speech.
But I wonder if we are able to find ourselves accurately reflected in the likely story. In the story's devotion
to a moral cosmos ruled by orderliness and art, something
human seems to get lost. I think the loss is especially felt
in Timaeus' treatment of our passions. For Timaeus our
passions are necessary but not good. Or rather, they are
good only insofar as they are necessary. The passions pull
us away from the orderly life of thinking. Timaeus tells
us something we know all too well from experiencethat the passions are terrible. But he does not leave room
for the possibility that a terrible thing is not for that
reason bad. Just as goodness is not necessarily identical
with order, badness is not necessarily the same as terribleness. The terrible things in us, those things Timaeus
sums up as "love that attempts all things," could very well
have more of a connection with the good things in us
than Timaeus is willing to admit. Is not our effort to learn
65
�the truth about all things rooted in a terrible longing,
a divine madness as Socrates calls it in the Phaedrus? 80
A soul possessed by the madness of philosophy is surely
not the same as a soul which has "made it to the top in
every philosophy."
In the likely story, the beautiful appears in one guise
only-the guise of mathematical structure. ForTimaeus
this mathematical beauty is always linked with nobility
or good character. It is never treated as something which
could awaken love. Iflonging is at all present in the likely
story, it is present in our longing to return to our original
condition as stars. But this sort of longing is prompted
by our desire to be orderly and well-shaped. Timaeus
at one point refers to the lover, the erastCs, of intelligence
and knowledge." But I think this refers simply to the
man who loves his own noble activity of building
mathematical models of Becoming.
The absence of the sort of beauty I am talking about
We never get to the true face of things in the story. We
must rest content with a beautiful mathematical facade.
The absence of the philosopher and the philosophical
love of the forms in Timaeus' cosmos brings up a
perplexity that lies at the heart of the likely story. Timaeus
often refers to the region of the forms which our cosmos
imitates. He refers also to the dialectical study of the
things that are always. Why then, when Timaeus constructs the cosmos and all its contents, does he leave out
philosophy as the study of the truly intelligible whole?
Why does astronomy rather than dialectic become the
highest human activity within Timaeus' cosmos? To
answer this question, we will seek guidance from the
divided line of the Republic.
On the divided line the level Socrates calls dianoia is
situated just below the level of dialectic. To this realm
belong all those activities called arts, technai. The most
important of these arts are the mathematical studies-
can be seen in Timaeus' portrait of human nature. The
arithmetic,
portrait combines the symmetry of structure with the
Socrates distinguishes these arts from the uppermost level
of dialectic in the following way. The mathematical arts,
unlike dialetic, make use of hypotheses which are never
grotesqueness of a medical operation. Let us consider
for a moment the beauty of a human face. In the likely
geometry,
astronomy,
and harmonics.
story, the face is entirely a matter of organs and their
questioned. Socrates compares such hypotheses to im-
proper functioning. If, for example, you wanted to say
that someone had beautiful eyes, Timaeus would point
out to you that the beauty of the eyes consisted in their
ability to see, especially to see the objects of astronomy.
The eyes, therefore, are beautiful because they lead us
ages. 82 This is why Socrates says that the mathematician
merely dreams the truth. 83 The mathematician is intellectually asleep, and in his sleep he has beautiful dreams
whose clarity and distinctness lull him into thinking that
he has found the truth itself. He is asleep because he does
not search for the original beings, the forms, of which
his own mathematical objects are likenesses. Caught up
in his dream world of beautiful structures, the mathematician beholds images, thinking all the while that the ob-
eventually to the ordering of our soul. Timaeus' account
of all the other facial organs follows much the same line
of thought. These organs exhibit nothing more and
nothing less than the gods' attempt to reconcile the
demands of orderliness with those of life's necessities. But
a face is not an orderly arrangement of parts that work
properly. It is a single, uncuttable look, an idea. It is
something that allows us to say "This is Socrates" or "This
is Theaetetus:' Because of the uncuttable look of the face,
we can identify Socrates and Theaetetus despite the
similarity of their faces. Furthermore, owing to the
character of the human face, it is ridiculous to give an
account of people by counting them. Timaeus shows us
that he does not know how to look at a human face. His
ingenious and well-meaning gods do not care if their arrangement of facial organs also inspires longing. Or
rather, if they care, they care because such longing would
cause us to "lose our heads" and become disorderly and
ugly.
The absence of a beauty that inspires longing in the
likely story is deeply connected with the absence of
philosophical love. The idea or look of the human face
resembles the uncuttable look of a Socratic eidos. This
eidos too cannot be reduced to a proper arrangement of
parts. In other dialogues, notably in the Symposium, our
perception of beautiful bodies is the starting-point for
our ascent to the purely intelligible region of the forms.
The likely story contains no such ascent. The cosmos is
our boundary and law-giver. And, as we saw earlier, we
must accept the likely story and not search beyond it.
66
jects of mathematics are in fact the truest, most original
beings. Despite the iinaginativeness characteristic of the
mathematical activity, he lacks the most important kind
of imagination. He is unable to see beyond the clarity
of mathematical objects to the more precise, -more
original, region of the forms. While the mathematician
works down from his unquestioned hypotheses to
necessary conclusions, the dialectician works up and back
to the vision of the forms. The philosophical education
Socrates outlines in the seventh book of the Republic
attempts to undo the mathematician's sleepiness, to make
the mathematical studies a ladder to the-higher region
of dialectic.
What we can say about Timaeus' likely story is that
it too works down from hypotheses. It embodies that intellectual activity Socrates calls dianoia. Unlike the
mathematicians described in the Republic, Timaeus begins
with the realm of the forms- the forms of Same and
Other, the intelligible animal, and the pure archetypes
of the four elements of body. Timaeus treats the forms
themselves as hypotheses from which he then descends to
make a world. Notwithstanding his supposition of these
forms, the motion of the likely story is away from the
assumed principles rather than towards them. What this
accounts for, I think, is the likeliness of the likely story.
In the likely story, we descend from the region of being
WINTER 1985
�to the image-world of becoming. We enter the beautiful
dream world of the mathematician. We build a hypothetical re-created world in speech.
As the cosmos gets filled and perfected in Timaeus'
story, it "closes upon itself:' It becomes a self-sufficient,
self-contained god. As we build this hypothetical world
with the powers of mathematics, we move further and
further away from the realm of Being which was our
starting-point. I think it is in this way that astronomy
as the highest of the mathematical arts comes to replace
the dialectical inquiry into first principles. This is one
of the important things the likely story dramatizes- the
covering up and forgetting of first principles as the true
objects of inquiry. Such a covering up is vital if we are
to guard and save the power of giving likely accounts,
of constructing theories. In the likely story, our desire to
ascend to the Republic's greatest study of the good gets
"swallowed up" by our attraction to the beauty of
mathematical structures. Because of this, the likely story
necessarily takes the form of play and diversion from
serious matters. True to our familiar expression "entertaining a hypothesis;' the likely story comes before us as
a form of entertainment for Socrates. As we have seen,
Socrates fully accepts Timaeus' conditions. He accepts
the likely story as his guest-gift and does not, on this occasion, search beyond it. He thereby takes the story in
just the right spirit, the spirit that shows exactly what
a likely story about Becoming is.
As the silent Socrates listens to Timaeus' song oflaw
and order, we of course wonder what he is thinking. My
guess is that he is enjoying his feast of speech, though
not because he is persuaded of its teaching. I think
Socrates must all the while be looking into Timaeus' face,
thinking about the quality of Timaeus' soul as it is
revealed in the likely story. He may be searching for some
trace of philosophical longing buried beneath the clever
constructions and worldly accomplishments that have no
doubt spoiled the glorious Timaeus.
Something is surely lacking in the Timaeus. This is
signalled by the famous absence of the fourth host. The
fourth host is perhaps the philosopher, who has no place
in the dialogue or in the world as Timaeus re-creates it.
The likely story offers us a strange and provocative
look at the world and at ourselves. But we do not find
ourselves accurately reflected in the likely world that
emerges out of Timaeus' head, the world without human
faces. For all its virtues of order and musicality, the likely
story leaves us with a need that can be met, I think, only
by turning back, back towards the first principles and
to those Socratic stories, like the myth of recollection,
which encourage us to turn back. Timaeus' cosmic song
thus draws our attention to that other singer who, for
now, silently listens.
FOOTNOTES
1. Timaeus 87c4-5
2. Ibid. 20b7 -c3
3. Ibid. 27a2-b6
4. Ibid. 29d4-6
5. Ibid. 106a3-4
6. Ibid. 59c5- d2
7. Ibid. 29c3
8. Ibid. 71a3-72d3
9. Ibid. 29c4- d3
10. Ibid. 29d6
11. Gorgias 523al- 3
12. R,public VI, 509d6-510a4; 511d6-e5
13. Timaeus 50d2-e1
14. Ibid. 56b3-5
15. Ibid. 41c6-d3; 41e4-42a3; 42d2-e4
16. Ibid. 42e5-43a6
17. Ibid. 91a4-b7
18. Ibid. 90e6-91a1
19. Ibid. 21a1-3; 26e2-27a1
20. Ibid. 24c7-d1; Critias 109c7-8
21 .. Thucydides, Pelopponesian Wars, II 40
22. Timaeus 83e4-5
23. Ibid. 30a4
24. Ibid. 29e2-3
25. Ibid. 30b4-6
26. Ibid. 31a4- b3
27. Ibid. 51b7 ~c5
28. Ibid. 32b6-7
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
35a8
35b4-36b6
36116-d7
36e2-3
42d1-2; 90c6-d7
37a2-c5
34b8-9
27d2
Aristotle, Physics; IV, 219b1-2
Timaeus 52d2-53a7
Ibid. 53c4-55c6
Ibid. 53d7-e2
Ibid. 47e4-5
Ibid. 48a6-7
Ibid. 48a2-5; 56c3-7
Ibid. 46e6-47c4
Ibid. 49a6
Ibid. 50d2- 3
Ibid. 52a8
Ibid. 51 a!- b2
Ibid. 50a4-c6
Ibid. 50e4- 8
Ibid. 52e5-53a2
Ibid. 53b4-5
Ibid. 50d2-4
Ibid. 53b2
Ibid. 48b5-c2
Ibid. 53c5- 6
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
57. Ibid. 37a5
58. Ibid. 51b8
59. Ibid. 48dl-4
60. loc. cit.
61. Ibid. 48a2-5; 56c3-7
62. Ibid. 92cl-3
63. Ibid. 68e1 - 69a5
64. Ibid. 34b10-35a1
65. Ibid. 69b8- c1
66. Ibid. 26c7 -d1
67. Ibid. 20d8
68. Ibid. 27a3-6
69. Ibid. 44d3-45a2
70. Ibid. 69c5-70e5
71. Ibid. 69d6
72. Ibid. 69d6- e3
73. Ibid. 39e3- 40a2
74. Ibid. 29e1-2
75. Ibid. 69c8
76. Ibid. 69d4-6
77. Ibid. 17a4-5
78. Ibid. 20al- 5
79. Republic VI, 508e1-509a5
80. Pha,drus 243e9 ff
81. Timaeus 46d7 -8
82. Republic VI, 510b4-51la2
83. Ibid.VII, 533b6-c3
67
�A Note on Eva Brann's "Roots of Modernity"
Chaninah Maschler
T
his note is a rather over-sized
response to Eva Brann's recent
"Roots of Modernity." (St.
John's Review, Spring 1984) Even after
several readings I find the essay (originally a lecture for students at a college
under Presbyterian auspices) hard to
understand. Its aim, in terms of the
original audience, seemed to be to help
students feel the weight of their religious
heritage by proposing the thesis that not
only they, as Christians, but all of us, as
moderns, live on or from Christianity.
Christianity's "world-historical" significance is made palpable by her sketching of an argument according to which
those respects in which modern life and
thought differ most profoundly from ancient life and thought (p. 69 list) can all
be connected with Christianity, either
directly, as preserving and implementing
Christian "spiritual and intellectual
modes" (p. 66), or indirectly, as expressing and drawing out the consequences
of a great refusal of at least portions of
Christianity.
What I call a "great refusal" (negation,
rejection) is given the rather different
name "perversion of." H-ere begins one of
my difficulties. Miss Brann's attitude to
the three men whom she singles out as
"founders of modernity" (Galilee, Bacon,
Descartes) is complex. Sometimes she
Chaninah Maschler is a tutor at St. John's College,
Annapolis.
68
praises them with faint damns, as when
she writes:
I am not saying that these founders
of modernity played silly and
wicked and blasphemous games,
but only that they still had the
theological learning and the
grandeur of imagination to know
what their enterprise resembled
[namely, the rebellion of Satan.] (p.
68)
Sometimes she takes grim satisfaction in
their getting the fall they deserved:
Their rebellion is ... against all intermediaries between themselves
and God and his nature. They want
to be next to him and like him. So
they fall to being not creatures but
creators. (p. 67)
Below I will try to state some of my
disagreements with both these passages.
Right now it is the pro-and-con attitude
itself that I am taking up. A to my mind
already perplexing situation (in which
many of us are caught), namely, that of
a non-Christian teacher who seeks to persuade Christian students, on nonChristian, intellectual grounds, to work
at appropriating their own Christian
heritage so that they may receive help
from it in fashioning or preserving a
"framework" for their thinking about ''the
nature and ends Of their life" (p. 69), is
made still more perplexing because the
teacher chooses to describe a negation or
rejection or refusal of elements of Christianity in words borrowed from the Christian tradition, words that would be
appropriate for someone who cleaves to
the teachings of Augustine but which I
find confusing as coming from someone
who expressly distances herself from those
teachings. What confuses me is that the
"complex" attitude seems weighted in the
contra-direction; I am unable to sort out
Miss Brann's reasons for this choice.
When Augustine says that Satan "did
not abide in the truth because the truth
was not in him;' he seems to identify
Satan's pride with envy, envy of the Son.
By the standards of Augustinian Christianity (though not, perhaps, by those of
Thomas), all human pride is ressentiment
at our being made the mere image and
not the reality of God, which is why people try to play lord over one another,
pretending to an inequality as that of God
to Man. Since, however, Miss Brann
declares herself a non-Christian, she can
be presumed free to distinguish proper
pride from soul-and-world-destroying
envy. Moreover, since, for her, Christ
would either be a prophet (as he is for
Moslems and Jews) or a teacher, it should
be possible according to her for a later
prophet or teacher so to interpret Christ's
message that its spirit is saved while its
killing letter is killed. It should even be
possible respectfully to decline the
teacher's teachings. Why, then, does she
not grant this kind of liberty to the
founders of modernity?
Descartes, for instance, in Meditation
IV, claims a will so large that it can double back on itself and shrink "commitment" to the sphere of what is evident to
the merely finite human understanding.
The cure for error, and even sin, is strictly
WINTER 1985
�in his own power. Indeed, his "method"
looks as though it should not only rid him
of errors previously committed but protect him against error and sin henceforth.
By teaching such Stoic self-help to others
he certainly seems to make the Sacraments superfluous to the Sage. Why call
this rebellion? Why isn't it, like Miss
Brann's own non-Christianity, a selective
by-passing of Christianity?
Again, Bacon when he writes (in "Of
Goodness and Goodness of Nature"), that
without goodness (which "answers to the
theological virtue of charity;') "man is a
busy, mischievous, wretched thing;' can
be read to give expression to something
like that Welcoming attitude to the pre-·
sent and to one's fellows for the lack of
which Miss Brann so much condemns
Heidegger. This attitude Bacon claims to
find in a properly doctored Christianity.
When he adds the sentence from
Machiavelli "that the Christian faith had
given up good men in prey to those that
are tyrannical and unjust;' isn't it in the
name of charity rightly understood that
he protests against such overweening
charity as does not heed God's command
to love our neighbor as ourselves (a command which he construes to mean that
"Divinity make the love of ourselves the
pattern; the love of our neighbors but the
portraiture")? To someone mindful of
Luther's protest against the pride of those
men who presume to "imitate Christ" it
is not at all obvious how Bacon's "realism''
isn't a reminder of the need for humility. 1
Admittedly, Bacon casts himself for the·
role of Advisor· to Princes (Queen
Elizabeth and King James I). In that
capacity he defends doctrines of royal
authority at odds with those which claim
that secular rulers, being charged merely
with the safeguarding of goods of the
body, are inferior to spiritual rulers, who
are charged with the perfecting of the
human soul. But critique of the doctrine
of Papal Plenitude of Power (see Introduction to Marsilius of Padua, Dejendor of the
Peace, Harper, 1967) was not initiated by
Bacon. He was trying to preserve the
English monarchy's earlier gains in authority. Since he served the ruler and the
church of the realm to the best of his ability, I again wonder on what grounds he
is called a rebel, though I recognize that
from a Roman Catholic perspective he
would deserve to be called so.
Miss Brann's come-back, if I understand her, is that not only or chiefly in
her estimation but in their own, the men
responsible for the "project" of finding out
the true constitution of the universe and
of using this knowledge to improve the
THE ST. JOHNS REVIEW
conditions of human life were rebels, not
against the church and the state, nor
against God, but against the "traditional
wisdom" which teaches that men can only
have opinions about good and evil but
cannot gain moral episteme (science).
Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes themselves
(on this reading of "traditional wisdom")
held that the idea of a science of good and
evil is "demonic?'
I choose Goethe's word (which is not
Miss Brann's) for two reasons: First,
because as he came to use it, for instance
of Napoleon, a romantic flavor clings to
it and it is such a romantic reading of
Paradise Lost that seems to me presupposed
by her sentence about the three founders
"all" having a "cautiously sympathetic
respect for Satan" (p. 67). Nicholas
Machiavelli didn't call himself"Old Nick."
Second, because what prompted me first
to set pen to paper was my more than
uneasiness over her willingness to use
Augustinian vocabulary to characterize
the work of men who, in a period of European history when demonology had regained frightful power, tried to re-assert
sanity. 2 The reason for my believing that
it is important to determine how the great
teachers of Christian doctrine meant their
passages about Satan to be understood is
that it seems to me I cannot otherwise
understand or appraise opposition to their
teaching. My current guess is that the
Christians and non-Christians who
wanted to de-emphasize the Augustinian
tradition were right in holding that this
tradition gave support to the witch-craze.
That there had been such a craze on the
continent I happened to have learned in
a Dutch elementary school, where
children were taught to take pride in the
fact that in the little town of Oudewater
a scale-test was substituted for the watertest: Anyone accused of witch craft should
show levity rather than gravity, it was
argued. Therefore, if the pan with the
witch in it went down, that proved that
the accused, though perhaps guilty of
other crimes, was not guilty of a pact with
the deviL Elsewhere the test was whether,
when thrown into the water, the accused
floated or drowned. Floating proved
witch-craft. Drowning proved the
contrary.
More recently, I read in Montaigne's
"Of Cripples" (iii,ll):
our life is too real and essential to
vouch for these supernatural and
fantastic accidents. As for druggings and poisonings, I put them
out of my reckoning; those are
homicides. . .. However, even in
such matters they say that we must
not always be satisfied with confessions, for such persons have
sometimes been known to accuse
themselves of having killed people
who were found to be alive .... My
ears are battered by a thousand
stories like this: 'Three people saw
him on such and such a day in the
east; three saw him the next day in
the west, at such and such a time,
in such and such a place, dressed
thUs. Truly, I would not believe my
own self about this. HoW much
more natural and likely it seems to
me that two men are lying than that
one man should pass with the winds
in twelve hours from the east to the
west. How much more natural that
our understanding should be carried away from its base by the
volatility of our untracked mind
than that one of us, in flesh and
bone, should be wafted up a
chimney on a broomstick by a
strange spirit.
I tried to get an idea of just how reliable
the rumor about the witch craze was by
reading H. R. Trevor-Roper's The Euro-
pean Witchcraze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (Harper, 1969), E. William
Monter's European Witchcmjt (John Wiley,
New York, 1969), H. C. Erik Midelfort's
Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany,
1582-1684 and the already mentioned
book about Witch belief in England by
Trevor Davies. If these authors are
trustworthy, Montaigne's principle, "...
it is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have a man roasted alive
because of them;' was very far from the
prevailing one. By some estimates, now
considered melodramatic, 100,000 people
were killed for witchcraft in Europe be-
tween 1500 and 1700. The only book I
have so far found that gives careful details
about how its figures are arrived at is
Midelfort's. According to him; "at least
3,229 persons were executed for witchcraft in the German Southwest" between
1561 and 1670 (p. 32). Of course, no such
The witches of my neighborhood
are in mortal danger every time
Some new authf::!r comes along and
attests to the reality of their visions.
... To kill men, we should have
sharp and luminous evidence; and
figure means anything exact until one
knows population figures too. But that
rumors about 30 Charles Mansons a year
would be pretty frightening is, I think,
fair to say. I bring up his name because
someone asked me whether it isn't
69
�necessary to examine whether some of the
accusations for witchcraft wouldn't by our
own standards be warranted in the sense
that real crimes were committed by those
who stood so accused. Norman Cohr.L
takes up the question in Europe's Inner
Demons (Basic Books, 1975). The crimes
(malef£c£a) of which witches were accused
were: causing hailstorms or unseasonable
rain to ruin the crops; causing miscarriages or impotence; bringing on sudden
illness, mental derangement, or accidents,
or deformities; and worst, killing babies,
cooking, and eating them. The power to
harm was always the result of a pact with
the devil, sealed by terrible obscenities.
Cohn argues (to me convincingly) that
the pattern of accusation is so stereotypical (he traces it to the second century,
1
'when pagan Greeks and Romans attached it to the small Christian ·communities in the empire"), and every supposedly documented case of witches's
sabbaths or infant cannibalism is so
dubious that the title of his book is warranted. He chooses a passage about
custom's being a treacherous school
mistress from Montaigne's "Of Custom,
and Not Easily Changing an Accepted
Law'' (i, 23) as frontispiece. Since I am
acquainted with the customary ritual
murder accusation against the jews, and
since some admittedly less than wholehearted investigation of this charge has
never presented me with reasons to
believe the justice of the accusation, I remain a partisan of those who sought to
dis-enchant the world. Amongst these I
count Galilee, Bacon, and Descartes.
Bacon dedicates the New Organon to
King James, before whom he dangles the
wonderful saying "that it is the glory of
God to conceal a thing but the glory of
the King to find a thing out!' (New
Organon, LLA ed., p. 15) Certainly Bacon
hopes to win the King as patron for largescale projects of scientific research and
technology. But I wonder whether he isn't
also trying to distract the King's curiosity from witchcraft's secrets (on which
James had written a book- Daemonolog£e,
Edinburgh, 1597; 2nd ed. London, 1603)
and to fasten it instead on "white magic."
It is perfectly true that such a hunch
would have to be backed up by passages
from Bacon's writings. But these are not
entirely lacking (Sylva Sylvarum, Stebbing's
JiliJrks of Bacon, ii, 642£), and it cannot be
considered unimportant that Parliament
in 1604 passed a new statute against
witchcraft according to which not the actual harm done through such craft but
"the mere fact of a contract With the devil"
70
was to be punished by hanging. That a
contract with Satan existed could become
known through confession or by finding
"witches's marks" (insensitive spots) on the
naked body of the accused (TrevorDavies, p. 62).
I even· wonder whether the passion
that went into Descartes's program of taking life and soul out of nature had
something to do with disgust at the
demon mania. That Cartesianism was
later used in the fight against the witch
craze is shown by the Dutchman
Balthazar Bekker's Betoverde J!Vereld (The
Enchanted World, )6~1) and Malebranche's
Recherche de Ia Verite (excerpts pp. 121ff of
E. W. Monter's European Witchcraze).
We would gravely wrong Christianity
if we supposed that it was chiefly responsible for originally stocking the world with
demons. There's plenty of Roman and
Greek demonology, and Hellenistic
Jewish Apocrypha are full of demons too.
Only, whereas in the so-called dark ages
many a bishop taught that belief in
werewolves and witches is unchristian,
church leaders between roughly 1500 and
1700 mostly encouraged rather than
discouraged popular fears. Around 1500,
the Dominican inquisitor in the little
diocese of the Province of Como reports
that a thousand witches were tried and a
hundred burned in his area every year.
According to the books I cited (to which
Bodin's Demonomanie must be added), the
situation in Como was not an isolated
one. If the historians' reports (not easily
dismissed, even by sceptics, seeing how
numerous, serious, and large the tomes
on witchcraft became with ·the invention
of print) are reliable, then it is reasonable
to wonder whether the founders of
modernity concluded that they could no
longer rely on the churches (Catholic or Protestant) to gentle and raise up the populace.
None of the men singled out by Miss
Brann were given to public ranting
against the church or clergy of the
country or city where they resided. They
were quite scrupulous to obey and to
recommend obedience to others, at least
as scrupulous as Socrates had been. They
not only wrote of an "interim ethics:' as
Descartes does in Discourse III and
Bacon in the New Organon, where he provisionally distinguishes "the proud and
ambitious desire of moral knowledge to
judge of good and evil" from "natural
philosophy:' but they _also practiced it.
And I do not see how, except by impersonating the standpoint of the Inquisitors,
Miss Brann could blame Bacon and
Descartes for meditating on the possibility
of an ultimate "moral and political
philosophy" that would be part of a
perfected "natural philosophy." True, there
is a great difference between meditation
and publication. Still, I wonder at the ease
with which she judges as due to
"unspeakable" pride what- others might
regard as due to a noble sense of
responsibility.
Let me turn now to those small but
perhaps telling literary and art-historical
facts on which Miss Brann's lecture relies
to make vivid that the three founders were
both warning their followers of the
dangers of the enterprise of establishing
"the kingdom of man" and advertising the
glory of it. 3 They are:
a) that in aphorism xciv ofBk I of the New
Organon Bacon writes:
Then only will there be good
ground of hope for the further advance of knowledge when there
shall be received and gathered
together into natural history a
variety of experiments which are of
no use in themselves but simply
serve to discover causes and axioms,
which I call experimenta lucifera, experiments of light.
In her judgment, this last tag is intended
to recall Satan's name before he became
rebel from envy of the Sun ..Son.
b) that at least two of our authors seem
to be intent on creating a new heaven and
earth, else why should they mimic the
Divine rhythm of creation by laying out
their scientific synthesis over six days?
c) that in his Letter to the Translator of
the Pr£nc£ples Descartes compares
philosophy to a tree (cf. New Organon I, 107;
Advancement of Learning, Everyman ed. p.
88; "tree of Porphyry"), which can be
presumed to be the very one that stood
in our First Parents' garden as the forbidden tree, and which also appears on the
title page of Descartes' Principles and
Galilee's DiScorsi.
When first one registers that
Descartes' Med£tat£ons are spread out over
a week sans Sabbath; that the Discourse too
is divided into six; that Bacon's Great Instaurat£on (Renewal) was meant to have six
parts; that the College of Bensalem is
called the College of Six Days; that the
Latin name of the "Preparation for
Natural and Experimental History" is
parasceve, which is Latin for the Hebrew
Erev Shabbath (cf. the prayer that concludes
Bacori's Preface to the Great lnstauration);
and yes, that Galileds D£alogues may have
stopped on the fourth day because that
is the middle of the seven and the day on
WINTER 1985
�which the heavenly bodies were madeone does stand amazed.
Nor would I want to deny the
Millenarian flavor of Bacon's Sabbath
talk. But it seems to me that every
"apocalyptic" passage in Bacon that I can
remember debunks the Biblical book
Apocalypse. For instance:
. . . All depends on keeping the eye
steadily ftxed upon the facts of
nature. . . . God forbid that we
should give out a dream of our own
imagination [whether of a world so
thoroughly gentled by the Lamb as
to hold no violent motions or of a
world delivered up to Demons] for
a pattern of the world; rather, may
He graciously grant us to write an
apocalypse or true vision of the
footsteps of the Creator imprinted
on his creatures.
The passion for knowledge is substituted
for the passion for revenge! Bacon and
Descartes, far from being the ones to
make the world shudder with the birthpangs of the Messiah, are trying to still
those pangs: to invite men to become
"masters and possessors of nature"_ is their
way of casting out demons. Their tactics
may have been ill-advised. May be the
Counter-Reformation Church, which
took a leaf from Euripides' Bacchae and
tried to tame the tumult through theatre
and its equivalent, was wiser. (I mention
the play to indicate that I am not even
confident that Biblical Messianism,
Jewish or Christian, was the ~~root" of
Europe's upheaval). But I do not see how
we can judge one way or the other until
we have learned something of the
political, social, economic, religious circumstances that Bacon, Galileo, and
Descartes were up against. That these
weren't pretty is insinuated by Bacon
when, in the essay "Of Custom and
Education;' he drops the names of Friar
Clement, murderer of Henry III of
France, and considered for canonization
by Sixtus V; Juan Jaureguy, would-be
assassin of William the Silent; Balthazar
Gerard, the man who succeeded in
murdering William. That Descartes too
wants us to understand the violent circumstances surrounding his meditations
on renovatio is shown by his eXplaining that
what brought ,him to Germany and to
that famous poele where he was sufficiently
"free of passion" to think were the religious
wars which, at the time of his writing of
the Discourse, and even in the year of their
publication, ~~were still not at an end."
Some twentieth-century historians
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
blame the Thirty Years War (1618-48) for
Germany's political backwardness as compared to other European nations, identifying it as the "root" of the horrors of the
first half of the twentieth century. More
than a third of the population of Germany
and Bohemia was killed off during that
war.
Returning to the much more pleasant
business of gauging the sense and the
weight that is to be given to the motif of
the tree and the six days, I should mention that only because, like Miss Brann,
I was intrigued by these details, I learned
that there is a long Christian tradition of
hexahemeral (six:.day) literature which
goes back to the church fathers. It seems
intermittently to intersect with a similar
Jewish tradition, of which kabbalah is one
expression. St ..Basil wrote a Hexaemeron;
so too did St. Ambrose and St. Bede, and
Oxford University Press recently _published a Hexaemeron by Grosseteste, this
last unfortunately not yet translated.
Of these books I have so far read only
St. Ambrose's. It is a series of sermons
delivered over the ftrst week of Lent. St.
Ambrose affectionately describes the
beautiful natural world that God made.
He seems to be using the opening chapter
of Genesis as a topical outline for natural
history."" From the translator's editorial
notes one learns that many of the joyous
descriptive passages are culled from
secular Latin authors while others are
recognizably lines from Job, Psalms, the
Prophets, or the New Testament where
the relevant natural wonder comes up.
The effect isn't really bookish. The congregation, eagerly waiting for Easter,
must have felt confirmed in its faith that
everything th~t God made is beautiful
and good, that God cares for men. There
is no hint of a conflict between secular
and sacred narration or of a tug of war
between edification and description.
Ambrose, as he unselfconsciously
allows Pagan authors (Cicero, Virgil,
Ovid, even. Lucretius) to testify, reminded
me of how I felt when, not far from Ambrose's Milan, in the little town of San
Giovanni di Bellagio on the shores of
Lake Como, I attended a festival honoring the lake and the saint who said that
God is love (that saint being the one after
whom the town is named). Perhaps this
merely private reminiscence of the_ great
fish catch, the young men's rowboast race,
the lights on the water, the local padre's
blessing of the children while he munches
on chicken drumsticks, the sound of the
churchbells, is not entirely irrelevant to
the question why Galileo, Bacon and
Descartes became "conspirators, for a
post-medieval way of life- ( cf. Preliminary
Discourse to the Encyclopedia ofDiderot, LLA
ed. pp. 72-80). Before they came on the
scene, others- I am thinking especially of
Colet, Erasmus, More, but perhaps
Nicholas of Cusa should be counted in
this group as well- had done all in their
power to work conservingly for reform,
for restoration of something like the
pastoral life and spirit (in all senses of the
adjective) I felt in Ambrose and the
festival of San Giovanni in Como (see
Three Oxford Reformers by Frederic
Seebohm, London 1869; any of Trevor
Roper's books on sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe; Henry Kamen's
little Signet paperback on the Spanish Inquisition). Their failure, in ·my judgment,
has great bearing on the choices made by
Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes.
As luck would have it, St. Ambrose,
while celebrating the works of the third
day, seems to comment on the tree pictured under the titles of the books of
Galileo and Descartes published by the
Leiden Elzeviers. 5
In truth, while you realize that you
possess frailty in common with the
flowers, you know that you have access to delight in the use of the vine,
from which is produced wine,
wherein the heart of man finds
cheer. Would that, man, you could
imitate the example of this species
of plant, so that you may bear fruit
for your own joy and delight. In
yourself lies the sweetness of your
charm, from you does it blossom,
in you it sojourns, within you it
rests, in your own self you must
search for the jubilant quality of
your conscience. For that reason he
says: 'Drink water out of thine own
cistern and the streams of thine own
well: First of all, nothing is more
pleasing than the scent of a
blossoming vine. Furthermore, the
juice when extracted from the
flower of this vine produces a drink
which is pleasureable and healthgiving. Again, who does not marvel
at the fact that from the seed of the
grape springs forth a vine that
climbs even as high as the top of a
tree? The vine .fondles the tree by
embracing and binding it with vine
leaves, and crowns it with garlands
of grapes. In imitation of our life,
the vine first plants deep its living
roots; then, because its nature is
flexible and likely to fall, it uses its
71
�tendrils like arms to hold tight
whatever it seizes. By this means it
raises itself and lifts itself on high.
Similar to this vine are the
members of the church, who are
planted with the root of faith and
are held in check by the vine shoots
of humility.
A little further on in the sermon Ambrose, by merging the tower of Isiah's Song
of the Vineyard with the tree just described, comes to identify the tree as the
church leaders- "the apostles> prophets> and
doctors" -while the vine remains the Christian Congregation.
If you look again at the Elzevier
emblem you will see that what twists
'round the tree is a grapevine with
bunches of grapes and that the scholar
who stands beside the tree seems to be
plucking some (cf. New Organon ii, p. 156
and 161 on "first vintage").
Consider next a passage fi-om Pica's
On lhe Dignily of Man (LLA ed., p. 28):
As the farmer marries elm to vine,
so the magus marries earth to
heaven, that is, lower things to the
qualities and virtues of higher
things.
Pica's lines alert us that, while listening to Ambrose, we didn't pay attention
to the question who planted the tree (now
identified as an elm) and who trained the
vine to grow upon it. The matchmaker,
God, was not pictured in Ambrose's
sermon. Only His voice was heard, from
far away, by those who remember the
Prophet who pleaded God's case with the
Congregation of Israel and its leaders ("I
ask you to judge between my vineyard
and me. What else could I have done for
it that I have not done? I expected it to
yield cultivated grapes, but sour ones
were all it gave.") In Pica the matchmaker
is on the scene, as he is in the Elzevier
picture.
Abstractly considered, Pica need not
have known Ambrose's use of the vinesustaining tree; he could have taken it
straight from the Italian landscape or
from Virgil's Georgics. But a passage in the
Heptaplous (LLA ed. p. 72) shows that
Pica did know Ambrose's sermon (or at
least, knew of it).
Putting the two passages together, we
seem to get a triple analogy: The magus
imitates God by imitating the farmer,
because as the farmer follows God's example when joining vine to tree in the
manner of God's joining the congregation
to its teachers, so the magus joins earthly
to heavenly things.
72
Now that the man in scholar's garb on
the Elzevier picture has been identified
as a magician, Miss Brann's case seems
clinched. We all know about Faust, how
he made a pact with the devil and gave
himself over to magic. Pica, however,
believes that there are two kinds of magic.
The first, he says, the Greeks called
goeteian.
The second sort they call by its proper and peculiar name, mageian, the
perfect and highest wisdom as it
were. Porphyry says that in the
language of the Persians, magician
means the same thing as interpreter
and lover of divine things means in
our language. . . The first is the
most fraudulent of arts, the second
is firm, faithful, and solid. . ..
From the second comes the highest
splendor and glory of letters,
desired in ancient times and almost,
always since then. No man who was
a philosopher and desirous of learning good arts has ever been studious
of the first. Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, Plato, traveled
across the sea to learn the second.
When they came back, they
preached it and held it chief among
their esoteric doctrines ... As the
first magic makes man subject to and
delivered over to the powers of wickedness,
so the second makes him their prince and
lord . . . The second, among the virtues sown by the kindness of God
and planted in the world, as if calling them out from darkness to light,
does not so much make wonders as
carifully serve nature which makes them.
(Hepiaplous, LLA ed. pp. 27, 8)
We shan't know what Pica means until we figure out what the powers of
wickedness are and what lower and higher
things his magus joins in wedlock. 6 Since
the Hermetic writings on which he relies
contain passages as crassly demonological
as the terrible stuff one reads when one
studies the court records of the sixteenth
and seventeenth century witchtrials, one
cannot rule out the possibility that goeteia
is black magic and that the powers of
wickedness are incubi and succubi. But I
feel pretty confident that Miss Brann's
suggestion that the magus, emulates the
ordained priest by joining conjuring words
to things (so that, where the priest "makes
Christ" from wafer and wine, the magus
"transsubstantiates" portions of nature)
won't work: In the first place, the
eucharistic miracle keeps the species
(which to the scholastics means precisely
the looks) the same though the substance is
altered whereas Pica's and Bacon's
transformations alter the specieJ but not,
I believe, the substance, since the presupposition of alchemical practices is one of
"catholic matter" (Newton's word). Second, the last sentence in the passage
from Pica's Oration seems to rule out any
except natural wonders. Indeed, it is not
hard to read what Pica says about goeteian
as making fun of priestly hocus pocus.
This is not necessarily the same as
impiety: Zwingli is a pious Christian. But
it Would be a scandalous reading, and I
simply do not know Pico well enough (the
tone of the Heptaplous is rather different
from that of the Oration) to judge: Goeteia
may be witchcraft or black magic.
If, then, "higher" and "lower" (in
Milton, who used the same tree··vine pair,
identified with Adam and Eve) are not an
analogue to sacramental words and
things, I can think of only two other
possibilities: that the superlunary world
is higher and the sublunar lower and the
magus an alchemist, who knows how to
channel astral virtues into earthly things
so as to raise them up; or that mathemata
(shapes, numbers, order relations) are the
higher activating powers and sensible
things lower. 7 The contrast between a
stellar and a mathematical constrUction
of "higher" things is probably erroneous
from the perspective of the magi
themselves. But either way, what matters
is that the magus does not draw the
liberal/servile arts distinction in the manner of the dominant Platonic tradition,
that he does not deem the farmer's work so far
beneath him that it cannot remind him of God's
work and lure him on to do his own work.
Simon Stevin, that wonderful physicist and engineer who served Maurice of
Nassau and his country so well, comes to
mind. Stevin seems to have designed his
own logos. One of these, the endless chain
accompanied by the motto "wonder/miracle that is no wonder/miracle;' is
familiar to older St. John's alumni and
tutors. 8 There are two others: The first
shows a man digging and a woman spinning and bears the words ''Labore et Constantia:' The second is a picture of an open
drawing compass, and the maxim that
goes with this mathematician's tool is the
same as the one that flanks the picture of
the farmer and his wife.
When, in an earlier review of Miss
Brann's Paradoxes of Education in a Republic,
I used the phrase "salvation through
work," I was thinking of an attitude such
as Stevin's. I intended to contrast it both
with Lutheran teachings concerning
WINTER 1985
�salvation by faith and with Catholic
teachings concerning the indispensability
of the church sacraments. I was, without
saying so, "secularizing" the notion of
salvation, no longer considering the soul
in terms of its thousand-year journey and
life eternal, but rather the human being
in terms of the three score years and ten
granted him or her on earth. This earthly
life is disfigured by much meanness, vanity, pain, insecurity. The new burgher
mood, I thought, was that of trusting that
God helps those who help themselves and
one another, that not only physical but
even moral improvement comes, if it
comes at all, from work; from the products that it yields, but also from working, and from the intellectual, moral,
psychological, social, political conditions
needed for work and in turn produced
and maintained by work.
This work ethic is often regarded as
Protestant. But it really is not clear to me
that it is fundamentally Christian. Yves
Renouard's writings on the ethos of
Renaissance Florence, Genoa, Venice,
Pisa (Catholic cities all) and TrevorRoper's critique of the Weber thesis that
there is a special connection between Protestantism and the spirit of capitalism,
suggest that the Christianity of those who
"believe in" the work ethic may be accidental. Experience of town life, and
relish for it, respect for, and knowledge
of, the varieties of expertise and discipline
of fellow townsmen, may have more to do
with it.
I hope that it is becoming apparent
that I am using this note as an occasion
to express doubts about the insulation of
"ideas" from economic and political conditions oflife; just as I am questioning the
comforting hypothesis that the books that
made a major diflE:rence to our ancestors'
thought and life are always books that we
fmd fascinating.
Even if it could be said that I have
shown that the choice of the six-day motif
does not, cif itself, mean "Let me do it" (said
by the child, the eagle-men, to God the
father)- "I can do it just as well as you,
and better than my elder brother;:..__and
even if the Elzevier tree is probably not
hung with apples, Miss Brann's contention (if I grasp her meaning) that a kind
of bleak difi"ance undergirds "modernity"
might still be justified. But I would urge
that if one finds such a spirit in Goethe's
Faust, or Marlowe's, or in Milton's Satan,
it would take much analysis and argument to show that this is what secretly
drives Descartes, Bacon, and Galileo.
In Descartes one might see a terrible
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ambition to be self-begotten and selfraised which, in its twentieth century
working out, self-destructs into solipsism
and "no longer hoping to be less miserable
but only to make others such as he is:' But
the prima facie differences between him
and Bacon and Galileo seem to me so
great (despite Descartes's aping of
Galileo's cameraderie with master artisans
and his citing of many a saying of Bacon's)
that I believe mor.e is gained from studying these three men's books separately and
seeing the differences than from trying to
find the features of Descartes underneath
the skin of Bacon's and Galileo's faces.
For instance: I spent much time
puzzling over the sentence about not
brooking intermediaries cited above. I
considered four possible interpretations:
1. intellectual tradition and colleagiality
as "between" God and self; 2. "adventitious" experience as "between"; 3. ordinary pre-scientific experience and ordinary ways of talking as "between"; 4.
Christ and Christ's vicar on earth as "intermediaries between themselves and God
and his nature." I had difficulties with all
four. I'll pass them in review.
Galileo expressly rejects the phoenixlike solitary genius picture of himself
(Assayer, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo
(Stillman Drake, Vintage ed., p. 239), is
entirely willing to distinguish peripatetic
university science (represented by an
anonymous individual coyly given the
nickname Simplicius after that commentator on Aristotle) from Aristotle (whom
he regards as a fellow scientist; see e.g.
Dialogue, 2nd day, pp. 110!), is glad to
recognize other men's splendor (e.g.
Michelangelo'S or Copernicus's), builds
his case against the peripatetic world
system little by little and in great detail.
How different his attitude to his fellows
is from Descartes's b.ecomes apparent
when one compares his way of writing
dialogues with Descartes's in the Dialogue
on the Search for Truth. Bacon too, though
he certainly makes fun of the "vermiculate" questions of the scholastics (Advancement of Learning, Everyman ed. p. 26)
and the gabby post-Socratics, does not
peremptorily dismiss them but explains
at length whit of their teaching he deems
pernicious and why. To argue against
someone is, to my mind, to aCknowledge
him. Thus, only in Descartes could I find
that isolation which, on one interpretation of her sentence about dispensing with
intermediaries, is meant by Miss Brann
( cf. Bacon's Advancement of Learning, p. 30
Everyrrian ed. on the subject of many wits
and industries and one wit; for contrast,
see Machiavelli Discourses IX and
Descartes' ruminations on city planning
and legislation in Discourse II.)
With respect to their attitude to sense
experience and the question how one
prepares oneself fOr being graced with insight into the principles formative of
nature, Descartes again seems to me quite
different from Galileo and Bacon. Yes,
Galileo extols Copernicus (Dialogue, 3d
day, p. 328) for having had the courage
to "rape" the senses (as one translator has
it; I have not checked the Italian} Yes, he
distinguishes "primary" from "secondary"
qualities (Assayer, Discoveries and Opinions
of Galileo ed. Stillman Drake, Vintage, pp.
275ft). But, in the first place, it is not at
all obvious precisely how this is "modern"
(post-Christian, or "Christian by negation
of Christianity"); that is, what more there
is in Galileo's favoring of koina aestheta over
idia aestheta than there already was in
Democritus, Parmenides, and Plato ( cf
Theaetetus 185ff and elsewhere; De Anima
425al5f). 9
In the second place, many passages in
the Dialogue (Stillman Drake ed., University of California Press, 1962, 1st day, pp.
61f, p. 76, p. 101: see also p. 51 on how
one moves to axioms) seem to me to show
how much "Galileo enjoys rather than
detests the fact that it is in encounters
with the given world that generative ideas
are suggested to the human mind. His
parable about the man who has fallen in
love with sound (Assayer, cited ed., pp.
256ft) confirms for me Curtis Wilson's
distinction between Descartes, who gives
metaphysical primacy to mathemata, and
Galileo, who gives them methodological
primacy. 10
Descartes reminds me just a little of
Pentheus in his fear of"wet and wildness"
(Hopkins' "Inversnaid"). For the reasons
sketched earlier, we might do well to take
his aristeia against the malicious demon
rather literally and to regard the
metaphysical search for guarantees of men's
being capax veritatis as a theomachia!
I see no such desperation in Bacon.
It is true that he likes to assume a grappling stance and that there is much talk of
overcoming nature as though she were an
enemy (who ought to be killed?) But
when he writes that nature, "to be conquered, must be obeyed," or that he wants
to restore "intercourse' between the mind
and nature, or that he hopes to "wed" the
rational and empirical faculties, he shows,
I think, that nature the adversary is also
the paramour. For us it's hard to square
atomism with a sense for the life in
nature. But this may merely go to show
73
�that Bacon's and perhaps even Lucretius's
atomism was different from Dalton's
(though the prevalence of sexual
metaphors like "elective affinities" in
chemistry lasts through the nineteenth
century). At any rate, that, even if one
might accuse Descartes of pretending to
seraphic direct and immediate knowledge
of the nature of things, Bacon does not so
pretend, is shown by many passages, fOr
instance:
To God, truly the Giver and Architect of Forms, and it may be to
the angels and higher intelligences
it belongs to have an affirmative
knowledge of forms immediately,
and from the first contemplation.
But this assuredly is more than man
can do.
. (New Organon II, 15.)
I reserve discussion of the moderns'
alleged by-passing of or disdain for prescientific "ordinary" experience and
language for another occasion, but want
to call attention to their relish for the
language of the market place.
This leaves the last interpretation of
the sentence about not tolerating intermediar)es between themselves and God,
according to which neither Christ nor the
chuich as avenue to Christ but the Promethean makers of modernity "save"
mankind. I do not see how one can attribute such ambitions to Galileo, except
on the supposition that anyone who
claims to know how the heavens go thereby
claims to know the way to heaven.
Enough said about why I am uneasy
about dealing with "moderns" en gros
rather than en detail.
It is a lot more plausible· to credit
Bacon and Descartes with the ambition to
replace Christ. Miss Brann believes she
is obliged to ascribe this kind of vainglory
to them because otherwise it is, to her, incomprehensible that these men, whose
imagination should have been well-taught
in the dangers of such knowing as
removes boundary stones set to human
power, were so fearless.
Let me put this another way, in terms
of the opening of Pica's Oration on the
Dignity of Man. Pica, after citing a
sentence from the Hermetic book
Asclepius, 11 according to which a certain
Moslem, Abdul, and the god, Mercury,
agree that nothing on the world's stage is
more wonderful than man, goes on to explain how he, Pico, interprets their saying:
... For the sake of your humanity
and with kindly ears, give me your
close attention: Now the highest
Father, God the master-builder,
had, by the laws of his secret
74
wisdom, fabricated this ho~se, this
world which we see, a very superb
temple of divinity . . With the
work finished, the Artisan desired
that there be someone to reckon up
the reason of such a big work, to
love its beauty, and to wonder at its
greatness. Accordingly, now that all
things had been completed, as
Moses and Timaeus testify, He
lastly considered creating man. But
there was nothing in the archetypes
from which He could mold a new
sprout nor anything in His
storehouses which he could bestow
as a heritage upon a new son, nor
was there an empty judiciary seat
where this contemplator of the
universe could sit
Finally the
best of workmen decided that that
to which nothing of its very own
could be given should be, in composite fashion, whatsoever had
belonged individually to each and
everything. Therefore He took up
man, a work of indeterminate form;
and, placing him at the midpoint of
the world, He spoke to him, as
follows: "We have given to thee,
Adam, no fixed seat, no form of thy
own . . A limited nature in other
creatures is confined within the laws
written down by Us. In conformity
with thy free judgment, in whose
hands I have placed thee, thou art
confined by no bounds; and thou
wilt fix limits of nature for thyself
. .. Thou, like a judge appointed
for being honorable, art the molder
and maker of thyself; thou mayest
sculpt thyself into whatever shape
thou dost prefer. Thou canst grow
downward into the lower natures
which are brutes. Thou canst grow
upward from thy soul's reason into
the higher natures which are
divine."
0 great liberality of God the Father.
0 great and wonderful happiness of
man! It is given to him to have that
which he chooses and to be that
which he wills. (Oration, LLA ed.
PP· 4,5)
Comparison with Republic IX 588ff should
make one wonder why what is in the
Republic chiefly regarded as a risk (the risk
of starving the puny little man inside and
feeding the lion and the many-headed
snake) is in Pica's Oration described as a
marvellous opportunity (cf. also Plato's
Protagoras).
The very premature guess at an
answer that might (if I have understood
her) be in accord with Miss Brann's
Hegelian-style hypothesis I suppose to be
this: After centuries of the Church's
teaching men their unfreedom (their incapacity to nourish their humanity except
through humble submission to mystery)
and after long observation of the worldly
advantages gained by those who hold
monopoly-access to the "works" 12 through
which men are bought free from the
powers of darkness, those who learned
that only a fraction of humanity is raised
on the doctrine of original sin came to
wonder ever more passionately at the
truth of this teaching. When someone
who has doubts about the truth of a doctrine takes cognizance of the advantages
gained from this teaching by those who
teach it (cf. the Pico citation on p. 12
above, italicized sentence about the first
magic), he is unlikely to continue in a
condition of doubt. He is prone to deny
it, or to affirm the truth of the formerly
doubted proposition's contradictory. Pica's
hymn to human freedom I view as an affirmation of the contradictory of the
Christian teaching that men are conceived in sin. It seems psychologically
plausible that a person who believes that
he has "seen through" the orthodox
teaching of our fall in Adam should feel
as elated as a patient who finds out that
the physician who warned him that the
condition of his lungs was such that he'd
die within the year had mistaken another
man's chest x-ray for his. The source of
Picds optimism, on this reasoning, would
be the joy felt at being delivered from
despair.
Delivering men from despair lS
Bacon's greatest ambition:
By far the greatest obstacle to the
progress of science and to the
undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this, that
men despair and think things impossible . . And therefore it is fit
that I publish and set forth these
conjectures of mine which make
hope in this matter reasonable, just
as Columbus did, before that
wonderful voyage of his across the
Atlantic, when he gave the reasons
for his conviction that new lands
and continents might be discovered
besides those which were known
before. (New Organon I, 92)
Most of the New Organon is given over
to uncovering and putting away grounds
for despair over the human ability to acquire more perfect knowledge than is
taught at the universities. But Miss
Brann's identification of the Elzevier tree
with the tree of knowledge gave expression to her wondering about the sources
WINTER 1985
�of Bacon's confidence in men's right to, and
moral ji"tness for, such more perfect
knowledge.
As for the right, why not, provisionally, trust that Bacon gets his hope from
where he says he gets it, the verse in the
creation chapter where God plans to
make man in His image and such as to
have dominion over all sublunar things
(Genesis !:26; cf. New Organon I, 129,
Parasceve last sentence; Great Instauration,
Preface)? Yet the non-Christian tradition
upon which Bacon and Pica are drawing,
when it concerns itself with re-entering
Paradise, stresses the great danger to individual and community when men who
are not morally fit in terms of native
temperament and careful training
"resume" (by studying maaseh- bereshithindifferently the narrative of beginning and
the making of the beginning) the
knowledge Adam had been granted: According to one story, four men entered
pardes: one went mad, one became a
traitor, one died, and only Rabbi Akiba
came forth whole. According to another,
certain scholars who had been studying
the creation story together fOr three years
came to understand it. As a result, "a calf
was created for them." They slaughtered
and ate it. But when they had concluded
their meal all their understanding proved
to have left them! These stories re-affirm
that what is in question is not men's ability to convert knowledge to use (as did
Thales and Archimedes too) but the
desirability of doing so, and the limitations, if any, upon such conversion.
But is that the issue between "ancients"
and "moderns"?
It is an issue, and a very important
one, in the opinion of those who are less
persuaded of the soundness of Mr. Klein's
distinction between "essential" and "accidental" history (or between "tracing
things to their roots" and "tracing their
history") than is Miss Brann. 10 them
much of Bacon's interest in technology
seems motivated by patriotic concern with
the stability of the realm. Fastening men's
interests, energies, intelligence on
economic well-being in this life is to
distract them from divisive religious passions and to unite them against those
who, by promising a bliss that none has
recently returned to .tell of, inflame the
human imagination with a zeal that is uncheckable because falsity of promise is entirely unverifiable. Precisely such promises were, according to Bacon, made to
the regicides mentioned by name in "Of
Custom and Education;' and are, according to current newspaper reports, being
made to Shiite terroristsJ13 It is also to
give hope to the English nation and their
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
ruler that England can, by industrial and
commercial superiority, prevail over Spain
and France. I am urging that Bacon's New
Organon be read against the background
of the Essays. The Essays (e.g. "Of Unity
in Religion;' "Of Nobility;• "Of Sedition
and Troubles;' "Of the True Greatness of
Kingdoms and Estates") supplement what
one gathers from Bacon's "Letter of Advice to Queen Elizabeth" of 1584, from
his proposals for legal reform and his urging of a more rational economic and tax
policy: Bacon is continually worrying over
impending civil war. Less than a generation later that war broke the nation apart.
It was not because he was "modern" and
"charged the now with special significance" that he had a "feeling of crisis." It
was because he looked across the waters
and saw what was happening on the Continent and realized that many of the conditions prevalent there also obtained in
England.
If this suggestion, that Bacon takes a
statesman's interest in technology, checks
out, then we, who in the twentieth century have learned something about nationalist excesses, will of course want to
learn why Bacon mistrusted nationalist
passions less than religious passions. We
cannot pursue that question now. Notice
though that if this is the right question to
ask, the "transformations" that Bacon had
in mind (primarily agricultural, metallurgic, medical and only very very ultimately
political) were a lot less radical than those
that a Marxist stateless and classless
humanity would require.
In fact, my recent reading of Bacon
makes me wonder whether we do not
altogether misconstrue him by ascribing
a rectilinear idea of time to him ( cf. "Of
Vicissitudes"). His frequent talk about
time seems to me quite compatible with
a cyclic picture: There i~ "progress" also
for those poised on the wheel of fortune,
when the semicircle down has been completed. Neither self-love nor philanthropia
nor nationalist ardor require that gains
(in knowledge, power, security, public
morality), to rank as gains, be permanent. For Lucretius, not only individual
organisms and civic bodies but even
worlds are mortal. Nevertheless book v
lays out the story of the progress of
civilization. It seems to me at least as
plausible that Lucretius served Bacon as
inspiration as that Christian Heilsgeschichte
did. The a- or even anti-political character of Lucretius's teachings is not a good
argument against me, since original
Christianity is equally a- or anti-political.
There are, of course, also very great
differences between Bacon and Lucretius:
Lucretius's theoretical interests are so
limited as to be virtually non-existent.
Any likely story that allays fear of death
and of avenging gods will do. The only
causal account he is serious about is an anthropological and psychological one,
which shows that nearly all wickedness
stems from fear of death. Bacon, contrarywise, though he cannot be credited
with a single scientific discovery and even
though he speaks much about science for
use, knows of the happiness that comes of
trying to find out how things really are.
I venture to say that (not unlike Hobbes
and Spinoza) he may even share in some
version of the Platonic or Pythagorean
faith that seeking to know makes human
beings better, which would explain why he
doesn't build hedges around potent knowing (in the kabbalist manner) but trusts
that scientists will use their knowledge
charitably. (LLA ed. New Organon, p. 15.
But cf. Laurence Berns, "Bacon and the
Conquest of Nature II;' Interpretation VII,
1 pp. 1fl)
This brings me to my conclusion. If
I am permitted to omit the case of Descartes, made complicated also by his expatriate condition, I would urge that Miss
Brann misconstrued the moderns's interest in fruits and undervalued their interest in light, It is because of the hidden
¥1Qdynamic nature of what is really real
that the modern natural philosopher, like
the presocratic students of nature, must
take an interest in the arts and crafts:
It is the mechanical arts which give
the better insight into the secret places
of nature. Uncontrolled nature,
with her profusion and spontaneity,
dissipates the powers of the
understanding and by her variety
confounds them. In mechanical
operations the attention is concentrated and the modes and processes of
nature, not merely her effects are seen.
(cf. pp. 73, 107, 109, 122, 53 ofLLA
ed. of NeW Organon, all on forms as
laws of action)
Again and again Bacon writes that "works
are of greater value as pledges of truth
than as contributing to the comforts of
life" (p. 114 LLA ed. of New Organon) or
words to that effect.
And even if it were to be shown that
he conceives his own role to be that of a
magus who joins the people or vine to the
elm tree or ruler, there is not only pride
but also humility in that matchmaker's
work, since it is to be tested by the
sweetness of the grapes so produced. The
great question is who shall be the
wine-taster.
75
�FOOTNOTES
1. "Biirgen" Luther writes: "soli man wUrgen .
Standing surety is a work that is too lofty
for a man; it is unseemly, for it is presumptious and an invasion of God's rights. For,
in the first place, the Scriptures bid us to
put our trust and place our reliance on no
man, but only on God; for human nature
is false, vain, deceitful, and unreliable ...
He who becomes surety puts his trust in
a man, and risks life and property on a false
and insecure foundation; therefore it serves
him right when he falls and fails and goes
to ruin. In the second place, a man puts
trust in himself and makes himself God, for
that in which a man puts his trust and
reliance is his God . ." ( U0rks iv, pp. 18-24,
cited in Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury:
From Tribal Brotherhood to Universal Otherhood,
Princeton, 1949).
2. There are many and long stretches about
demons in the City of God; see also Of Christian Doctrine ii, 23. I used to read these, as
well as passages in Luther about the Devil
and his cohorts, metaphorically. But I now
believe that this is an error. Thomas Beard,
Oliver Cromwell's teacher, reports that
Luther "in his colloquies telleth us how
Satan oftentimes stealeth away young
children of women lying in child-bed and
supposeth [substitutes] others of his own
begetting in their stead, in the shapes of
incubus and succubus; one such child
Luther reporteth of his own knowledge at
Halberstadt ...." (R. Trevor-Davies, Four
Centuries of Witch Beliefs, Benjamin Blom,
1972, p. 102).
3. The tree and day motifs are probably not
seriously being offered as "evidence" for the
Satanic self-conception of the new science,
and Miss Brann may mean no more by
"Satanic" than that there is something Promethean about the work and vision of the
three founders. But I worry over even jokingly re-establishing connections between
the old-time religion and suspicion of
science. To her Satan and Prometheus may
be one and the same, but to the students
she addressed (and not only to them)
Satan, the father of lies, and Prometheus,
the titan of foresight and the friend of
mankind, are not the same. What I am
questioning may, therefore, be the advisability of her rhetorical mode rather than
the truth of her thesis about the Christian
"roots" of modernity. I am really not sure.
One of the reasons for my not being sure
is that it seems as though the enterprise she
calls "tracing things to their roots;' which
to others looks like "intellectual history;'
seems to have practical implications, or at
least, implications for attitude; and I have
a hard time determining why a plain prose
statement about the dangers of technology
and the misguidedness of clflims for scientific theory stronger than those of the
Timaeus would not have done just as well
as a search for roots.
76
4. A dictionary observation about this expression may be in order. Bacon and Locke and
Boyle and even Teddy Roosevelt all still use
the word "history" or "historical" in the "data
gathering" or "investigative" sense when
they speak of "natural history" or "plain
historical method" or "history of the winds"
or "museum of natural history."
5. See the entry "Elzevier" in the eleventh edition Brittanica. It was the Leiden branch
of the formerly Flemish publishing family
that adopted the tree emblem (curiously
referred to as "the solitary" though the
message is "Non Salus") in 1620.
6. I suppose that the words "Non Salus" that
accompany the Elzevier emblem allude to
the words in Genesis "It is not good for man
to be alone." Cf. New Organon I, 89 for a
"forbidden marriage" and pp. 23, 3, 14
LLA ed. on commended marriages.
7. On alchemy, see Maryjoe Teeter Dobbs,
Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, Cambridge
University Press, 1975. I found this book
especially helpful in its effort to explain how
and why moral and religious self-formation
was thought to be accomplished through
alchemical practices. This should be a very
important theme to anyone who values the
distinction between liberal and servile arts
on the ground that, unlike the merely
useful arts, the role of the liberal arts is to
improve the human soul.
8. Cf. Last sentence of citation from Pica on
p. 12 above.
9. The rumor that Galileds "mathematization"
of nature involves its "idealization" has
reached me too. But I observe that however
irrelevant to the finding of the weight of
supposedly impure and consequently inherently inexact sublunar "sticks and
stones" the Pythagorean discovery of incommensurability is, Archimedes nevertheless argues the proposition that such
bodies balance at distances from the
fulcrum reciprocally proportional to the
bodies' weights as though they were
superlunar exact bodies. Else, why treat the
commensurable and the incommensurable
classes of cases?
10. How unreductionist Galileo is next to
Descartes is seen by comparing what
Descartes writes about the heart-as-a-pump
with the conclusion of Galileds parable
about the man who loves sound:
Well, after this man had come to
believe that no more ways of forming tones could possibly exist
when, I say, this man believed he
had seen everything, he suddenly
found himself once more plunged
deeper into ignorance and baffle~
ment . . . For having captured a
cicada in his hands, he failed to
diminish its strident noise either by
closing its mouth or stopping its
wings ... At last he lifted up the armor of its chest and there he saw
some thin hard ligaments beneath;
thinking the sound might come from
their vibration, he decided to break
them in order to silence it. But
nothing happened until his needle
drove too deep, and transfixing the
creature he took away its life with its
voice.
. By this experience his
knowledge was reduced to dif~
fidence, so that when asked how
sounds ·were created he used to
answer tolerantly that although he
knew a few ways, he was sure that
many more existed which were not
only unknown but unimaginable. I
could illustrate with many more examples nature's bounty in producing her effects, as she employs means
we could never think of without our
senses and our experiences to teach
them to us, and sometimes even
these are insufficient to remedy our
lack of understanding.
My point is that although Descartes has
read Harvey, he either fails to grasp that
a pump that is a muscle is a very
remarkable sort of pump or he cares about
nothing except itS being a pump. (Cf. Arthur Collins's shrewd observations about
Descartes' physics in "Unity of Leibniz'
Thought," St. John's Review, Winter
1982/83).
11. If you want to see snakes ori the tree, the
cadduceur, which is both the physician's and
Mercury's emblem, is probably the icon to
go for.
12. It is a matter of the greatest importance
that the dispute between Luther and the
Church of Rome over faith and works is
not primarily or at least not solely a dispute
about "passive" and "active" righteousness
in the moral sense but very much a dispute
about the need for or dispensability of the
church sacraments. 'Works" in Sacred Doctrine corresponds to avodah in jewish tradition. Avodah ("service") is, so long as the
temple with its sacrificial cult stands, the
temple service. Only through the prophets
and rabbinic elaboration of certain
elements of their teaching, does avodah
chiefly become ''doing justice, loving kindness (ahavath chesecl) and walking humbly
with God." The Roman Catholic church is
not just an ecclesia or synagogue but a temple and the mass is a sacrifice. I consider this
information indispensable to anyone concerned with the issues Miss Brann takes up.
However sane and tolerant modern American. Catholics may be, however
wholesome, psychologically, a religious
tradition which, through its sacrificial cult,
makes re-integration of the sinner into the
community a public act, the complaint of
critics of the church in the days of its corruption through worldliness, namely, that
it stood to profit from its monopoly on the
instruments of salvation (the seven
sacraments) was not fabricated.
13. Religious zeal of this sort is certainly not
the privilege of the Roman Catholic Christian, as is evident from the murder of the
De Witt brothers by a Protestant mob.
WINTER 1985
�BooK REVIEW
Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart:
Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni
Wye Jamison Allan brook
Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1983.
Pp. xii + 396; 11 figures.
T
he subjects of Mrs. Allanbrook's
book, Mozart's masterpieces Le
nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni,
are two of the most familiar and best loved
works in the operatic repertory. Not surprisingly, they are also two of the most
thoroughly studied. Mozart's version of
the Don Juan legend has fascinated
writers from the time of E.TA. Hoffmann
and the early Romantics to the present.
Figaro, while less an object of interest in
the nineteenth century, has in recent years
been examined for its underlying political
and social message, and in relation to
Beaumarchais's Le mariage de Figaro, from
which its libretto is drawn. Yet the vast
body of writings on these two operas by
no means leaves modern scholars with
nothing to add. It is a cliche, but no less
valid for being one, that with a great work
of art there will always be more to learn.
This is particularly true when a new study
offers a fresh perspective from which a
work can be reexamined. In her book
Mrs. Allanbrook provides a detailed and
insightful critical analysis of Mozart's two
great opere bu.ffe; her fresh perspective is
that of the topoi, or "topics:' that underlie
the music of the late eighteenth century.
The term topos is borrowed from
rhetoric "to designate 'commonplace'
musical styles or figures whose expressive
connotations, derived from the circumstances in which they are habitually
employed, are familiar to all" (p. 329, n.
4 ). Once the vocabulary of these topics
has been understood, they can serve as a
source of "independent information
[beyond our individual responses] about
the expressive content of the arias and
THE ST JOHN'S REVIEW
ensembles" (p. 2). The "hunting fanfare:'
for example, is a topic employed in any
number of Classic works in obvious imitation of actual horn-calls associated with
the hunt. Mozart's use of this figure to
open his String Quintet in E-flat, K 614,
enables a listener to place the work in a
general expressive framework. The
Quintet is not literally about a hunt, but
an audience's recognition and understanding of the figure give the music a
certain rustic quality and a sense of
lightheartedness and cheerful energy,
which derive by analogy from an actual
hunting scene.
The connection between the topical
vocabulary of the Classic style and the expressive qualities of Classic music has
been increasingly recognized in the last
three decades. Various topics have already
been identified and explored to some extent by other writers, especially Leonard
Ratner (in his Classic Music: Expression,
Form, and Style [New York, 1980]). Mrs.
AllanbroOk's study concentrates on a particular class of topoi: the rhythmic gestures
of dance, which, because they depict
human beings in motion, are especially
valuable topics in opera. The various uses
of gavotte, minuet, and so on communicate information about the personality and feelings of each of the
characters, as well as about their social
positions. (An important question, which
Mrs. Allanbrook never answers directly,
is the degree to which these rhythmic
gestures inform Mozart's non-operatic
music, and the operas of other composers,
as well as the two works under
discussion.)
The study comprises three large sections. In the first, the author outlines the
variety of dances known to the late eighteenth century and spells out the social
and affective connotations of each. Here
she draws extensively on eighteenthcentury writings, both of music theorists
such as Sulzer and Koch and of writers
on dance, most of them less well~ known
to musicians, such as Bacquoy-Guedon
and von Feldenstein. While some of the
dance topics are considered briefly in
Ratner's book, Allanbrook's discussion is
far more detailed and systematic. She
shows a clear spectrum of meters from the
most exalted, "ecclesiastical" duple meters
(alta breve and 4/2) that connote the
"learned" or contrapuntal style-and by
extension the nobility- to the more rapid
triple-meter dances with their connotations of humble frivolity. In addition, she
analyzes the historical and sociological
significance of the two anomalous dances,
the contredanse and the waltz, that represent the new trend in the late eighteenth
cen~ury towards simpler dances for
novtces.
The second and third sections of the
book examine in turn Le nozze di Figaro
and Don Giovanni, using the vocabulary
of rhythmic gestures presented earlier to
reach some striking conclusions. Allanbrook attempts to demonstrate that the
central ethos of F£garo is pastoral, and
that, far from being an operatic wateringdown of Beaumarchais's political message,
Da Ponte's and Mozart's opera is most
centrally about the friendship between the
Countess and Susanna, her maid. The
pastoral, with its connotations of bucolic
77
�simplicity, is suggested by several dance
gestures used in the opera: the 6/8
pastorale and siciliano, the 2/4 gavotte,
and especially the musette-gavotte. As
Mrs. Allanbrook argues, the many
numbers with pastoral connotations serve
to suggest a world in which Susanna and
the Countess can transcend the barrier of
class to meet as equals and as friends. The
heart of this world is the duet "Che soave
zeffiretto;' whose "pastoral text and music
figure the classless, timeless meadow
where two women ordinarily separated by
circumstance can meet and stroll quietly
together" (p. 147). And it is under the
aegis of the pastoral affect, at numerous
other places in the opera, that the Count's
schemes are defeated by Figaro and
Susanna and their allies. The argument
is a provocative one, though the multiple
meanings of "pastoral" are never spelled
out with sufficient clarity to support fully
the weight of the interpretation. We may
see, for instance, why it represents a
refuge from the brutal and selfish world
of the Count, but it is not clear why the
pastoral is "classless?'
In her treatment of Don Giovanni
Allanbrook takes a revisionist view of the
central character. While Don Giovanni is
the center around whom all the other
characters revolve, careful analysis reveals
that he is both essentially inarticulateKierkegaard saw him as a kind of
primitive life force-and empty. The
author points out that the Don is
anonymous; only once, in "Fin ch'an dal
vino," does he sing a solo that is not a conscious performance or disguise. Further,
Don Giovanni's obsession with seduction
has a coldly automatic quality, like the
need of an animal for food. This obsession makes him not so much evil or immoral, as has often been argued, as
simply outside human morality.
Don Gz'ovanni is distinguished from
Figaro by the overshadowing presence of
the supernatural (in the overture and
finale to act II). Of necessity, this widening of the framework carries with it a
price. "In accommodating the divine
perspective the opera has somewhat to
distort our view of that small part of the
world where we were formerly at home:
to gain the new dimension the vivid
planes of Figaro's terra firma must be compressed into a caricature of themselves, a
shadow play" (p. 199). The richness and
complexity of the world of human
78
morality and interaction are greatly
reduced, so that by comparison to Fi'garo
the other characters in Don Giovanni
(perhaps excepting Donna Elvira) have
the quality of stock figures, without much
depth and largely without the ability to
engage our sympathies. This lack of depth
has been pointed out before, particularly
with respect to Donna Anna and Don Ottavio; but Mrs. Allan brook's view of the
whole opera provides a powerful explanation for the phenomenon.
The analytical treatment of Figaro and
Don Giovanni that comprises the heart of
the book has many strengths. Despite the
title of the study, Mrs. Allanbrook's
discussion is by no means limited to matters of rhythm; she also employs more
traditional methods of harmonic, motivic,
formal, and linear analysis. This flexible
approach is complemented by the author's
concern with textual and dramatic as well
as musical matters, which enables her to
make many subtle points about the
dramaturgy of the works in addition to
correcting older misconceptions. She successfully defends, for example, the oftmaligned series of arias that precede the
finale to act IV of Figaro, by showing how
they fit Da Ponte's and Mozart's view of
the real subject of the opera. Similarly,
she rather convincingly refutes the notion
(of Edward Dent and others) that Don
Giovanni was originally <;:onceived in four
acts. In its broader dramatic framework
her analysis presents a needed corrective
to many older studies that viewed these
operas from the far narrower perspective
uf instrumental music. (This is largely
true, for example, of Siegniund Levarie's
Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro: A Critical
Analysis [Chicago, 1952].)
An important key to the success of
Mrs. Allanbrook's approach is its creative
and "humanistic" orientation. At its best
her analysis emphasizes not technical
features but revelations of character of
musical ethos. She is most concerned with
the ethical and moral world inhabited by
the characters, and the power of her
analysis depends chiefly on the degree to
which technical points are linked to the
larger central points she is making. At
times the many details of the discussion
may obscure the main thread somewhat,
as during the extended analysis of the
Statue scene in the finale to act II of Don
Giovanni. At a few other moments, an
analytic point seems forced or ques-
tionable. Far more often, however, the
reader nods and smiles in agreement at
a sensitive and insightful discussion of a
passage. Mrs. Allanbrook's treatments of
two marvelous moments- the final reconciliation between the Count and Countess
at the end of Figaro, and the Commendatore's death scene in Act I of Don
Giovanni-are particularly successful. On
several occasions the author shows how
the rhythmic organization of a theme differs from a hypothetical, more "orthodox"
phrasing. This technique, as in her
discussion of Donna Anna's "Fuggi,
Crudele, fuggi;' invariably leads to striking observations.
In all respects but one, the prodUction
of the volume matches the elegance of
much of the writing. The layout and
typography of the book are well styled
and its abundant musical examples are
carefully produced and easy to read. The
virtual absence of typographical errors is
equally admirable. But the lack of a
bibliography is rather frustrating; its
absence compels the reader to search
through the 53 pages of endnotes for the
first reference to a given author.
The central value of Mrs. Allanbrook's study rests on two interrelated accomplishments. The analysis of two of
Mozart's greatest operatic masterpieces is
challenging and genuinely enlightening.
Its flexibility of approach and its concern
for ethical and spiritual matters make the
book a model of critical analysis at its
most humane. But the other achievement
of this study, its presentation and
demonstration of a largely new conceptual framework for studying the music of
the late eighteenth century, is ultimately
more far-reaching. As Mrs. Allanbrook
shows, a grasp of the topical vocabulary
of this music can lead to a variety of new
insights into its expressive message. The
section on topos and the understanding of
rhythmic gesture should be required
reading not only for lovers of the Mozart
operas but for all students of the music
of the Classic era.
John Platoff
John Platoff is an Assistant Professor of Music at
Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. He is currently
working on a study of the operas of Mozart and his
contemporaries, to be called "Mozart and the Viennese Opera Buffa."
WINTER !985
�The Presence of Grace and Other Book Reviews by Flannery O'Connor
compiled by Leo J. Zuber and edited by Carter W. Martin,
University of Georgia Press, Athens 1983,
189 pp. ($17.25)
F
lannery O'Connor wrote the reviews
collected here almost exclusively for
the newspapers of Georgia's two
Roman Catholic dioceses. Anyone familiar with the species, "diocesan weekly;'
will know two things. First, at a scant twohundred words even Flannery O'Connor
was reined-in tight. (She called the
reviews "notices.") And second, she was
running-at least by New York Review of
Books standards- in a slow pack. Yet in
the event, the pieces bear all the marks
of the thoroughbred.
Surprisingly few Uust 25 of 143) touch
on literature or criticism. She mostly reviewed titles in hagiography, studies of
scripture, letters, and spiritual meditations. None is superficial, but neither are
they "packed:' Rather, as one might expect from a writer of her wit and nicety
they all are drawn to a telling point. What
one might not expect is how much they
seem to tell us about Flannery O'Connor
herself without being exercises in selfrevelation.
Given her unquestionable talents
some readers will still presume to lament
the "waste" of her energies in a quaint
faith and backward country. American
writers are, after all, conspicuous "roadplayers." And although Marion Montgomery's Why Flannery O'Connor Stayed
Home is one of the better scholarly adventureS of recent .times, that author's answer,
one partly grounded in the reviews collected here, will still puzzle readers
charmed by the "free-agency" of contemporary author-celebrities.
Flannery O'Connor did not have a
THE ST. JOHN'S REVIEW
"career" in any of the conventional senses.
She called her activity both a vocation
and a craft, the end of which was good
writing. Period. She wrote, she said,
because she was "good at it;' and she
stayed at home most happily because she
could write there. For her immediate concern was simply practical as it would have
to be for any good craftsman- even for
a practitioner of some version of "art for
art's sake:'
If her immediate and public concern
was practical, Flannery O'Connor's final
concern was private and spiritual. In her
review of Carol'ine Gordon's How to Read
a Novel she carefully distinguished those
concerns. But as her reviews of other
books, .especially the books of Romano
Guardini, make clear, she believed that
spiritual and practical things are most
true to themselves when coincident in
time and place. She hinted at, but lacked
the space to develop, what was clearly a
sacramental aesthetic. She does direct the
reader to her constant source and authority in such questions, Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism which she seems
to have absorbed but never reviewed.
Just as the "stuff' of her stories came
from her locale, the rural South, so the
force of her spiritual penetration of that
"stuff' came from her Catholicism. She
once wrote to Andrew Lytle that"... the
only thing that keeps me from being a
regional writer is being a Catholic and the
only thing that keeps me from being a
Catholic writer (in the narrow sense) is
being a- Southerner?' Together the South
and Catholicism formed Flannery
O'Connor's one home. They combined
her immediate concerns and raised her
art above the parochialism of both the
local colorist and the parish fabulist.
More important still, they saved her from
that graver parochialism known as the
"literary career:'
For a long time now writers have felt
the need to justify their ways to readers.
But often as not they have been more interested in apologizing to themselves for
their own strange talents and mysterious
gifts. Flannery O'Connor's needs and interests in that last regard were not unique,
which is not to say that she gave any of
the common accounts of herself as an artist, but it does make the scope of her
reading for review less strange than it
might at first appear. For she seems to
have constantly turned to other minds
and voices to help articulate her place, her
powers, and her vocation in a world that
she knew she did not make.
We regularly celebrate lesser writers
for tediously parading their struggles
toward self-understanding, something
modern writers, like their readers, tend
to confuse with their art. Flannery
O'Connor simply looked to share her
Creator's own view of His creation and
to retrieve some nuance of that perspective in her art. She called it seeing the
"good under construction?' Those who
dare to write from such a place verge on
prophecy. The prophetic-poet is a frequent, if understated, theme in these
reviews. Few modern writers seem to have
been so fully conscious of what they were
up to. Without pomp or fanfare The
79
�Presence of Grace tells us more about what
Flannery O'Connor thought she was doing "at home'' than we have any right to
expect.
No one will rank these book reviews
with her fiction, or with her remarkable
letters, The Habit of Being. The Presence of
Grace, like her occasional talks, Mystery and
Manners, can only be read as incomplete
notes toward a memoir of Flannery
O'Connor's intellectual home. In this in-
80
stance the neighborhood is peopled with
the likes of Hans Kung, Eric Voeglin, and
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S. J. Like
every memory it bears a foreground of
things in sharp focus and a background
of things begging to be retrieved.
At the very least, the reader who takes
the trouble to wade back and forth among
these reviews will begin to see in Flannery
O'Connor what she remarked in one of
her own heroes, Friedrich von HUgel: the
mark of"... a genuine encounter with the
Church, a wrestling with it, a love tested
by considerable adversity.. ;' The Presence
of Grace tells us that a spacious and fearless
mind like Flannery O'Connor's is most "at
home" in such moments. To witness it
here is no small delight.
Victor Gallerano
Victor Gallerano, an alumnus of St. John's College,
Annapolis, lives in Washington, D.C.
WINTER 1985
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
<em>The St. John's Review</em>
Description
An account of the resource
<em>The St. John's Review</em><span> is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John's College. All manuscripts are subject to blind review. Address correspondence to </span><em>The St. John's Review</em><span>, St. John's College, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401 or via e-mail at </span><a class="obfuscated_link" href="mailto:review@sjc.edu"><span class="obfuscated_link_text">review@sjc.edu</span></a><span>.</span><br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> exemplifies, encourages, and enhances the disciplined reflection that is nurtured by the St. John's Program. It does so both through the character most in common among its contributors — their familiarity with the Program and their respect for it — and through the style and content of their contributions. As it represents the St. John's Program, The St. John's Review espouses no philosophical, religious, or political doctrine beyond a dedication to liberal learning, and its readers may expect to find diversity of thought represented in its pages.<br /><br /><em>The St. John's Review</em> was first published in 1974. It merged with <em>The College </em>beginning with the July 1980 issue. From that date forward, the numbering of <em>The St. John's Review</em> continues that of <em>The College</em>. <br /><br />Click on <a title="The St. John's Review" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=13"><strong>Items in the The St. John's Review Collection</strong></a> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
thestjohnsreview
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
80 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Office of the Dean
Title
A name given to the resource
The St. John's Review (formerly The College), Winter 1985
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1985-01
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Sterling, J. Walter
Freis, Richard
Walsh, Jason
Freis, S. Richard
Sachs, Joe
Stickney, Cary
Wilson, Curtis A.
Sachs, Joe
Brann, Eva T. H.
Kates, J.
Engelberg, Joseph
Zuckerman, Elliot
Fain, Susan
Fisher, Howard J.
Kalkavage, Peter
Maschler, Chaninah
Description
An account of the resource
Volume XXXVI, number 1 of The St. John's Review, formerly The College. Published in Winter 1985.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
ISSN 0277-4720
The_St_Johns_Review_Vol_36_No_1_1985
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
pdf
St. John's Review
Deprecated: Directive 'allow_url_include' is deprecated in Unknown on line 0